Tom Regnier — Did Shakespeare Really Write Shakespeare? (Power Point Presentation)

now one thing I want to say about the authorship question this is a topic that sometimes leads people into almost getting into fistfights okay so I'm just saying I hope we don't have any of those here and I hope that even if we disagree after we've discussed all this about who actually writes Shakespeare's plays we should all still be friends because what brings us together is that we love Shakespeare we love Shakespeare's works and we're all interested in that and that is a reason for being friends whatever else we might disagree on now I want to tell you a little bit about how I got started on Shakespeare not the Shakespeare authorship question just yet but but just Shakespeare and it really started when I was about eight or nine years old and I read Charles and Mary lambs tales from Shakespeare okay see heads nodding some of you have read that right when you were children are you read it to your children but these are very nice retellings of the plots of the Shakespeare plays for children and it was a very good start for me a very good introduction because when I was eight or nine years old I knew what pound of flesh referred to I knew who Romeo and Juliet were even knew who Beatrice and Benedick were so it's a great way to get started especially for children and then when I was about 10 I saw a production of The Tempest on TV that's writing mcdowell on the left and Lee Remick on the right maybe somebody remember seeing that but I was enthralled and still it continued my interest in Shakespeare in high school I studied Shakespeare Julius Caesar was the first thing later in high school we studied Hamlet now this is a picture from Laurence Olivier's of movie of Hamlet and this is where Hamlet is uttering that famous line I can't tonight I have a headache now of course I also went to Europe after I finished high school and I visited stratford-upon-avon and when I got to college I took a full year course on Shakespeare and studied an awful lot of his plays really delved into them and there was something that really struck me in one of my textbooks and it was by Louis Wright who was then the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library and he said it is incredible that anyone should be so naive or ignorant as to doubt the reality of Shakespeare as the author of the plays that bear his name yet so much nonsense has been written about other candidates for the plays that it is well to remind readers that no credible evidence that would stand up in a court of law has ever been adduced to prove either that Shakespeare did not write his plays or that anyone else wrote them now I had heard before that a little bit of mentions of an authorship question that some people thought that Shakespeare didn't really write Shakespeare's plays but what what I took away from this is he says there's no evidence than anybody else wrote the plays and they thought well if there's no evidence then why is there even the discussion about it if you think somebody else wrote the plays you'd have to have some evidence wouldn't you and he said there wasn't any so I I took that at face value at the time now I want you to remember that phrase he said there's no credible evidence that would stand up in a court of law because I'm going to get back to that phrase a little later now a couple of years after college I was an intern in what was then called the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival today it's called the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey at Drew University and didn't really think about the authorship question until 1991 when I was in an airport and I happened to see this issue of the Atlantic and it was about the authorship question and of course I bought it because it was about Shakespeare and I loved Shakespeare I loved performing in the plays I loved reading the plays I loved seeing them perform and so if there was some controversy about it fine I'm in let me let me read about it so this magazine had articles by two people with opposing viewpoints one who said that the Stratford man was the author of the plays and one who said that somebody else was the author of the plays now this was the first time I actually read somebody's argument about why they thought Shaq spear of stratford-upon-avon did not write the plays of Shakespeare and I wasn't necessarily convinced by him but I could see why there was a question and so I kind of left it at that didn't think about it too much for a few years and then around the year 2000 I was getting ready to enter law school and a friend told me that PBS Frontline was repeating a special that they had done back in the late 1980s called the Shakespeare mystery and so I watched that and it was very interesting it gave me a lot more food for thought I still wasn't necessarily convinced that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare but I could see that there was some sound arguments being made that you had to pay attention to that that he didn't write the plays um and one of the interesting things that I learned from this that I didn't know and I don't know if many people know this is that Mark Twain was a big skeptic of the traditional authorship theory in fact he wrote a whole book on it it's called is Shakespeare dead and it's the last book that he wrote and doesn't get much attention these days not as much as Huckleberry Finn but I just want to make one point well I happen to have this picture of the book up here on the screen it says on the cover that it's by Mark Twain and what that means is this book was written by a man whose name was Mark Twain and he was born with that name and he died with that name and he had that same name all through his life and there was no other possible explanation for why that name would be on that book so just keep that in mind as we're going through this inquiry now Mark Twain in his book loved to make fun of the epitaph that the Stratford man wrote for himself that's on his gravesite good friend for Jesus sake forbear to dig the dust and close it here blessed be the man that spares these stones and cursed be he that moves my bones okay well that's that's nice but it's kind of simplistic both in its form and in its content and a lot of us find it a little difficult to believe that this was written by the same man who wrote this I but to die and go we know not where to lie in cold obstruction and to rot this sensible warm motion to become a needed clod and the delighted spirit to bathe in fiery floods or to reside in thrilling region of thick rimmed ice that's from measure for measure now let's take a look at a question that Louis right I've mentioned earlier of the Folger library broader and let's ask this question why would anyone believe that William Shakespeare did not write the plays that bear his name and I'm going to answer that question with another question do the plays really bear his name and I'm going to answer that with still another question what's in a name you can quote me on it okay and let's take a look at the name that was actually on the books the poems and plays that were published in the late 1500s early 1600s the author's name was Shakespeare the way we spell it today almost always it was this way on the works and occasionally it was hyphenated and I'll get into that a little bit later but let's look at the records for the Stratford man well his name was Bill - expir when he was born that's how it was spelled on the records and when he died they spelled it Scheck spear now in the meantime of there were variations of the spelling shag spear Shack spur Shack spur and in the Elizabethan days people were pretty flexible about the way they spelled things so you know somebody if somebody was writing your name he told him your name he would write phonetically it may not actually be the way you spelled it and that was okay but usually the person himself would have a consistent way of writing his name so it seems a little bit odd that the men from Stratford if he was actually writing these plays and poems would not conform the way he spelled his own name to the way it was being spelled on the works that were published now if this were the only oddity in the Shakespeare authorship question I probably wouldn't think too much of it but but really it's just the beginning let's take a look at the man signatures these are the six recognized signatures of William Shakespeare of stratford-upon-avon as you can see some of them look like he had some difficulty writing it and actually it's been commented that they don't all look like they're written by the same person in fact Jane Cox who was the custodian of wills at the public records office in London said in 1985 that it is obvious at a glance that these signatures with the exception of the last two are not the signatures of the same man almost every letter is formed in a different way in each literate men in the 16th and 17th centuries developed personalized signatures much as people do today and it is unthinkable that Shakespeare did not which of the signatures reproduced here is the genuine article is anybody's guess now what Jane Cox doesn't say perhaps somewhat diplomatically is maybe none of these is actually his signature now all of these signatures are on legal documents so it's quite possible that a law clerk wrote in the signature for him because he had difficulty signing his own name and if he had trouble writing his name how did he write Hamlet that is really the question now unless you think that other Elizabethan writers had terrible signatures here are some counter examples in the upper left-hand corner is Anthony Mundi signature to the right of him is George Chapman lower-left is Thomas Dekker and lower right is Michael Drake not sure how well you can see it in the back but the signatures are much much clearer much more readable and distinctive than the Stratford man's signature well what about the Stratford man what documentary evidence do we have of shacks beers life actually there's quite a bit we have about 70 documents that were made regarding him during his lifetime and what do these documents tell us well they tell us about his baptism the date of his marriage the birth of his children his money lending activities they tell us about some lawsuits he was involved in he would sue a neighbor over a shilling or so although of course a shilling was worth a lot more in those days that it is now tax records there's a time when he was fined for grain hoarding now we do know he was a theater shareholder and he did do some acting or two records of his having acted in plays and he left B quests to some of his fellow actors in his will and he died in 1616 these are what the documents from his life tell us that basically covers most of the ground but what they don't tell us is that he was any kind of a writer there's no document from his lifetime that says that this man was a writer now that seems a little odd um also I'm going to go back to Lois right the director of the Folger library and as as I said before he said that there's no evidence that Shakespeare did not write his plays or the name what anyone else wrote them and he said if there's no evidence that would stand up in a court of law well what he does say is that the facts are that he Shakespeare had a very good education acquired in the Stratfor Grammar School now years later I looked back at those statements by Louis right and this one really kind of got to me because I can tell you this there is no evidence that would stand up in a court of law that William Shakespeare Oh Stratford ever went to the Stratford Grammar School now they did not keep students records of students names in those days but still there's no extrinsic evidence nobody ever wrote a letter saying oh I went to school with the Shakespeare who wrote that play Hamlet or something like that there's nothing that corroborates that he went to the strip for Grammar School and actually since his parents were illiterate it's likely that he might not have been able to get into it because you had to have some reading ability to into the Stratfor grammar school so we can't necessarily say that he ever went to that school now you might say well isn't there a lack of evidence of a literary career for other Elizabethan writers a very good question maybe most of the evidence has been lost for other writers as as well as the Stratford man this occurred to the woman on the right here Diana Price and she read that book that's pictured on the left Shakespeare's unorthodox biography which was first published in 2001 and Diana Price started out as a defender of the Stratford theory uh and then she started really looking into the Stratford z-man's Stratford man's life and she said well there's no evidence of a literary career here so she started looking for what she called a literary paper trail not just for the Stratford man but for 24 other Elizabethan writers because she wanted to do a comparative study and see well maybe you can't find any any evidence from his lifetime that Ben Jonson was a writer or or John Webster or any other playwright at that time so she did a thorough research on all these authors and she was looking for things like this now there's a list of ten things here I'm not going to go into all of them but these would be things that would be indications during the person's life that he was a writer evidence of being paid to write handwritten matters concerning literary work miscellaneous records referring to the person as a writer and she went through this entire list of 24 authors and she noted the number of types of literary paper trail that she found for each one and what I'm gonna show you next is there's going to be a number next to each name and that's the number of types of literary paper trail that she found for that person now up at the top of the list is Ben Jonson for whom there are all 10 types of literary paper trail so his literary career is very well documented and then the list goes on down eventually you get to John Webster for whom there are only three but still there's evidence from his lifetime that he was a writer and then there's checks beer for him there's nothing interesting now we could of course argue that well maybe all the evidence got lost but it's odd that it would all be lost for that one person and not for these other 24 writers something that still exists for all of them so what's this a literary man well there's no evidence of education as I said no letter exists from him and we know he was going back and forth between London and Stratford so you'd think he would have written letters home sometime no evidence that he ever owned a book now in his will which mentions all kinds of specific household items like a bowl and a sword and the second-best bed that he left to his wife there's no mention of books or bookcases or desks no musical instruments there are a lot of references to music in Shakespeare's plays so this all seems rather odd and in those days people would often list the books that they were leaving to other people by name in their wills there's nothing of that in his will no one in Stratford ever referred to him as a literary man during his lifetime his son-in-law a physician and now this is very interesting to me son John Hall was married to his daughter Susanna and of course he was literate as you had to be to be a physician and he kept a detailed diary of his experiences and when he met the poet playwright Michael Drayton he was sure to make a note of that in his diary never says anything in his diary about his father-in-law being a playwright in fact when his father-in-law dies he just says something like my wife's father died the other day nothing about the great playwright so this all seems very odd and when he died in 1616 there were no eulogies from other writers no tribute there was a great silence in England it was basically a non-event to most of the country when he died now this is quite a contrast to today which is 400 years after his death and there are going to be all kinds of commemorations and celebrations and and festivities in honor of the 400th anniversary of the death of this man that from all we can tell is just a Stratford grain merchant so um here's Diana prices challenge she says if writing plays were a crime there wouldn't be enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that William Shakespeare was guilty now whatever you may think you may if you study the evidence and you think that Shakespeare was the author that that's fine with me all I want people to take away from this basically is that there is room for reasonable doubt about the traditional theory it's not a certain thing and that it is something that's worth looking into now some people might ask what about references to Shakespeare's works by other writers in the 1590s and early 1600s don't those identify the Stratford man as the author William Shakespeare now of course the first work published under the name William Shakespeare was Venus and Adonis a long narrative poem which was published in 1593 and when that was published people started writing about it they would say things about Shakespeare style in Venus and Adonis and Shakespeare's dis and Shakespeare that but if you look carefully you'll see that all of them are talking about the work they're not talking about the man nobody ever says that they met Shakespeare or that they identify him with the Stratford man they're simply talking about and critiquing the work so just as you would write a book review you might write a book review about somebody doesn't mean you know the person who wrote the book you're just critiquing what the person said in his book now Stanley Wells who is a prominent Stratford ian's professor admitted that there was no evidence before 1623 which is when the first folio was published that identifies the writer William Shakespeare with stratford-upon-avon so there's no contemporary evidence all the evidence is posthumous starting seven years after the Stratford man died so on the question of was this a literary man Hugh trevor-roper a history professor at Oxford found that Shakespeare's elusiveness was exasperating and almost incredible after all he lived in the full daylight of the English Renaissance in the well-documented reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James the first now we know that the Elizabethans loved to create documents there are lots and lots of documents from the Elizabethan age and of course not everything is going to survive something's got got lost in fires or things like that rats might have eaten some of them but there's still an awful lot of documentation from the Elizabeth Elizabethan age that people have been sorting through in recent centuries and a queue trevor-roper goes on to say and since his death since Shakespeare's death has been subjected to the greatest battery of organised research that has ever been directed upon a single person now what he's talking about there is that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries English scholars descended upon Stratford and in village archives anywhere in England that they thought they might find anything that might help them to understand how this man from humble origins came to write these great plays and of course their reputations as accurate to act as academics would have been made if they had found something but they found very little and they found nothing that we would call a literary paper trail now they did find one of those signatures of the Stratford man that I showed you earlier but they didn't find anything that identified him as a writer so as Hugh trevor-roper goes on to say and yet the greatest of all Englishmen after this tremendous Inquisition still remains so close to a mystery that even his identity can still be doubted that was in 62 that he made that comment well then why do people think that Shakespeare was Shakespeare there are a few pieces of evidence not too many three or four pieces basically but I'm going to just concentrate on what is by far the most important piece of evidence and that is the first folio that was published in 1623 now let's talk about this book the first folio um this was published in 1623 seven years after the Stratford man died and it has 36 Shakespeare plays in it about half of which had never been published before so we might not even know of them or know of their existence so if the first folio hadn't been published well how is it that it connects the Stratford man to the works of Shakespeare well now ben jonson the great Elizabethan playwright wrote most of the preparatory material and in one of the those places he refers to Shakespeare as the sweet Swan of Avon well so there you have it that's stratford-upon-avon right except not quite so fast because there are five rivers in England called Avon Avon is the Saxon word for river so referring to Avon doesn't necessarily pin it down to stratford-upon-avon and also a British scholar Alexander Waugh has recently demonstrated that Avon was the ancient name for Hampton Court and Hampton Court is the place where Shakespeare's plays were performed for Queen Elizabeth and later for King James the first so calling him the Swan of Avon could simply mean he is the the person who wrote the plays that were performed at Hampton Court so there's some ambiguity there and of course with Ben Jonson you've always got to be aware of the ambiguity he was a master of it maybe even more than Shakespeare was well there was something else there though something there's a mention of Stratford thy Stratford monument and of course many of you if you've been to Stratford may have seen the the monument that's in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford this man so would that have pinned it down for a people who lived in London and saw the First Folio when it came out well not exactly there were at least ten towns or villages named Stratford in England and that must have been a nightmare for the postal delivery service they didn't have zip codes yet so again that doesn't exactly pin it down there's some ambiguity there and of course the mention of that Avon and the mention of Stratford are pages apart in the in the folio so people might not connect them at all but I think what's really most important about the First Folio and I could go on and on about the ambiguities in it but I could spend a whole lecture on just that but I think what's most interesting about it is the picture of the author that it tries to paint and this starts with a line that probably everybody's familiar with and it says of Shakespeare and though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek so it's basically saying this is now a man of great learning he didn't know foreign languages very well maybe he knew a little bit but this is not about somebody who had a great university education and there's another passage that's even more telling and this is supposedly written by Hemings and Candell who were two of Shakespeare's fellow actors now just as an aside critics of going back to the 1700s have demonstrated pretty persuasively that Hemings and Candell probably didn't actually write what was attributed to them it was probably all ghosts written for them by Ben Jonson but aside from that let's just take a look at what it says and take it at face value it says Shakespeare as he was a happy imitator of nature was the most gentle expresser of it his mind and hand went together and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have stairs received from him a blot in his papers so here's basically the image that the first folio was trying to put forth we've got this kind of simple country boy didn't have much education not a lot of book learning and he just wrote what came into his head it was almost like it just he was channeling the word of God and he didn't have to go back and cross things out or revise things it all just came out perfectly from his head well that's that's kind of interesting but is that really accurate about the person who would have written Shakespeare's plays that he didn't have much education that he didn't go back and revise things again I'm going to Lewis right from the Folger library the facts are that the plays show no evidence of profound book learning the plays show no evidence of profound book learning I find that a very interesting statement here's why and you can try this experiment I've done this at the University of Miami library go to some major library like a university librarian go to the place where they keep the books on Shakespeare you'll probably find several rows of shelves of books about Shakespeare many of them analyzing and dissecting the plays many others analyzing Shakespeare's knowledge of particular subjects and I'll give you an example from my own experience now as Margaret mentioned I have taught a course called Shakespeare and the law at the University of Miami School of Law and we would spend a semester studying legal illusions legal plot twists legal references in Shakespeare's plays six or seven of his plays and we spent a whole semester on that there are about 50 books written on shakespeare's knowledge of the law and I can tell you from teaching a course on this that his knowledge of the law is very comprehensive he understands law from the big picture he also understands the tiny technical detail and you could not teach a law school course on Ben Johnson's knowledge of law or Christopher Marlowe's knowledge of law or any other Elizabethan playwright nor do people write books on those subjects so it's quite a quite hard to believe that the person who wrote these plays did not have formal legal training and that is of course one of the points that particularly Mark Twain fastens on in his book is Shakespeare dead that the person who wrote them had to have studied the law seriously not just read a few things about it or discussed it with a few friends at a bar or something like that and Shakespeare's knowledge of the law is really just the beginning because people have written written entire books on his knowledge of not just the law but also medicine and books on medicine in those days were usually written in Latin and Greek and were very expensive people do not have them in their households for the most part and by the way a few years ago I was at a Shakespeare conference and I heard a neurologist give a talk on shakespeare's knowledge of Neurology so that's how technical and how precise Shakespeare is knowledge as to somebody who's an expert in the field other subjects on which people have written books about shakespeare's knowledge hunting falconry falconry was an aristocratic sport commoners were not allowed to participate horsemanship military life military tactics military equipment philosophy commedia dell'arte navigation classical mythology folklore biblical or plants and animals agriculture and gardening music heraldry precious stones Italy Greek drama and yes there are even two books on shakespeare's knowledge of typography ok no great book learning in in the works huh ok alright we'll go along with the what Louis right says now here's the way I describe what I call the Shakespeare conundrum in order to believe that Shakespeare was Shakespeare it's necessary to suppose that the son of illiterate parents and by the way his children were illiterate too for whom there's no evidence that he ever went to school never wrote a letter or ever owned a book somehow attained a world-class education that included fluency in several languages a deep understanding of a great many technical subjects that the list I gave you just just now before this thereby becoming one of the most literate people of the Elizabethan age in fact whoever what Shakespeare's plays had to be one of the most literate people who ever lived and gained all this knowledge without leaving a clue as to how he did it now we don't say that a person from humble origins like the man from Stratford could not have somehow attained a terrific education that the education that a person would need to write the works of Shakespeare but how did he do it without leaving a trace there's no evidence no nothing in his handwriting or anything that shows that that he was literate so that's extremely hard to explain well if Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare then who did that is the question so um let's ask this question could William Shakespeare have been a pen name well did they have do people use pen names in those days why would they do that well according to Taylor and Mosher who wrote seminal book on anonymous and pseudonymous writings in the 16th and 17th centuries which they refer to as the Golden Age of pseudonyms almost every writer used a pseudonym at some time or other during his career here are some examples of Elizabethan pseudonyms Martin Maher prelate that somebody who's related writing on religious topics Cuthbert Currie knave Tom tell truth now notice that all these names have hyphens in them and all of they were sometimes spelled without the hyphen that was often the signal that the name was a pen name and as I've mentioned Shakespeare was sometimes also spelled with a hyphen I think what's different about these from the name William Shakespeare is that these are more obviously made-up names whereas William Shakespeare sounds more like it could be a real person's name it's in fact it's similar to a real person's name such as William Shakespeare so actually that would make it a better hiding place than one of these pseudonyms which everybody's going to see that's a pseudonym and people are going to try to figure out who's behind it so let's say that you want to write and you want to have a pseudonym why would you pick the name Shakespeare what's the reference there well most likely it's a reference to the goddess Athena the spear shaker the goddess of wisdom philosophy arts poetry and music and as I mentioned the first works published under shakespeare's name were two long narrative poems Venus and Adonis and the rape of Lucretia so if you're planning to write some poems that have a philosophical bent to them in which you want to express your wisdom you might want to make your name a tribute to the goddess Athena now what about the name William well that comes from the German Vilhelm the Latin guglielmi s' French Guillaume and the old Dutch guild helm which means golden helmet and as you can see here the goddess Athena is often pictured with a golden helmet so that would all fit together that would make sense if you're going to be a writer and you're going to be writing poetry well who might have been writing under the pen name William Shakespeare well a lot of people have been suggested Sir Francis Bacon Christopher Marlowe William Stanley the 6th Earl of Darby Edward de Vere the 17th Earl of Oxford Mary Sidney the Countess of Pembroke and actually a lot of other people have been mentioned and some people say well there's so many candidates that shows that that's there's really no issue there but actually the reason so many other people have been mentioned as possible authors is that almost everyone who's been mentioned is much more likely to have written the plays than the man from Stratford now I think there are only a few that that really hold up that's so implausible if you examine them closely and these 5 that I've shown here are probably some of the more plausible ones and I'm going to get into what I think is the best argument for who read Shakespeare and it was written by a man named Jay Thomas Loney in 1920 he wrote a book called Shakespeare identified now you'll notice the way he spells its name his name has got two O's in it so it could be pronounced loony although my understanding is that he pronounced it Loney and unfortunately when the book came out people who wanted to criticize it did not bother to actually deal with his argument or analyze it or find flaws in it they just simply said well the man's Looney so what he's saying you know it can't be true and of course that's not not a real argument as any rational adult can can tell so let's let's look a little bit at what he did when he wrote this book Shakespeare identified and it's interesting that the novelist John Galsworthy referred to this as the best detective story I ever read and he did use a detectives techniques basically he created a profile of 18 characteristics that he believed the real author must have now let me tell you a little bit about Loney he was a schoolmaster he taught Shakespeare for many years in England two boys at what we call the high school level and so he's very familiar with the works and he had come to believe that it just couldn't possibly be the Stratford man for many of the reasons that I've explained here so just going by the works which is all he had he made this list of characteristics now I'm not showing all eighteen here I'm just going to touch on a few of them he thought it had to be a mature man of recognized genius somebody who was not adequately appreciated in his time and enthusiasts for Italy there are quite a few Shakespeare plays that are set in Italy so he thought that the person must have to know something about Italy he was loose and improvident in money matters and conflicted in his attitude toward women now that last one is probably based on lines like frailty thy name is woman and of course the attitude that the author has for the Dark Lady of the sonnets which is conflicted I think is the word so anyway he talked about circumstantial evidence as the kind of evidence he was looking for and by the way I am a lawyer's as Margaret mentioned and I can tell you this in a court of law you can prove a case most of the time completely with circumstantial evidence so if you've got a lot of circumstantial evidence it may very well be enough to prove your case and Loney gave his definition of circumstantial evidence and as a lawyer I think it's a very good definition very astute he said circumstantial evidence is in practice the most reliable proof we have the predominating element in what we call circumstantial evidence is that of coincidences a few coincidences we may treat as simply interesting a number of coincidences we regard as remarkable a vast accumulation of extraordinary coincidences we accept as conclusive proof there does become a point when it's just too many coincidences you can't explain it any other way than then one certain way so he goes on to say it's not upon any point separately but upon the manner in which all fit in with one another and form a coherent whole that the case rests now what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you who it was that lonely thought wrote Shakespeare's plays and I'm going to give you quite a bit of circumstantial evidence although I can't get into all of it in this short period of time I could go on for hours with it but of course the first piece of evidence that I show you you'll probably think oh well that doesn't prove anything and you'll be right because it doesn't not by itself circumstantial evidence works cumulatively so you really got to look at all the evidence and then when you find they're just too many coincidences to explain away that's when you start to think that maybe you're on the right track so the person that lonely found fit all the characteristics he was looking for and he was the only person who even came close was Edward de Vere the 17th Earl of Oxford so the question is did Edward de Vere write the plays of Shakespeare well I'm going to give you some circumstantial evidence first of all is a book called the art of English policy which was published in 1589 now let me just mention first of all that this book was published anonymously we don't know who wrote it there are a lot of theories about who wrote it and people have arguments about it was this person or that person but there's actually an authorship question about the art of English policy and that's not uncommon when you look at the Elizabethan age because so many things were published anonymously or under pseudonyms but the author of the art of English policy whoever he was or she said I know very many notable gentlemen in the court that have written commendably and suffered it to be published without their own names to it suffered of course meaning aloud so basically what he's saying is that he knew of no notable gentleman in the court that had published things either anonymously or under a pseudonym they didn't have their own names on it as if it were a discredit for a gentleman to seem learn it now um this gets to one of the the mohrís of the day and that is that it was all right for a nobleman to publish a serious work like say a treatise on philosophy or religion or something like that maybe science was befitting a nobleman but poetry was considered frivolous that was something you did in your spare time or what they call your idle hours and if you were a nobleman and you wrote poetry you would probably have it in manuscript form and you would pass it around among your friends but you wouldn't have it published and plays well that was even worse than poetry that was beneath poetry the play houses were scandalous places where there was a thievery and prostitution and gambling going on and so no nobleman would want to be associated with that now the author of the art of English policy goes on to say there are noblemen who have written excellently well as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest of which number is first that noble gentleman Edward Earl of Oxford now right here we have a contemporary reference during Oxford's life somebody saying that he's a writer in fact a few of his early poems and gotten out and it had been published we don't know if they were with his permission or not but we do have some some early poems that he wrote that's not the only references to Oxford as a writer during his lifetime 1598 Francis Mears said that Oxford was one of the best writers of comedy okay really interesting we don't have any comedies that have come down to us under his name uh so that's that's kind of interesting here are some other pieces of circumstantial evidence regarding Oxford in 1578 and this was long before anything was published under the name william shakespeare gabriel harvey in a latin oration which was presented in Queen Elizabeth's presence said of Oxford Voltas Televi brought which I'm told by people who understand Latin better than I do can be translated as thy will shakes Spears or thy countenance shakes Spears so this may be something that gave Oxford the idea for using the pen name Shakespeare later on we know that he was a patron of the Arts he loved poetry and drama he commissioned many books and 28 books were dedicated to him during his lifetime now that's more than were dedicated to anybody else in the Elizabethan age except Queen Elizabeth herself several of his youthful poems survived and I think that you can see in them the seeds of Shakespeare's sonnets although they're certainly not as polished and sophisticated as the sonnets but we believe that the sonnets were written in his maturity he had two theatre troupes a men's troupe and a boys treat now you often hear oh well we think that the Stratford man had to do it because he was a man of the theater well so was Oxford in fact we have more evidence of Oxford being associated with theatre performance than we do for the Stratford man he leased the black friars theatre in the 1580s and black friars theatre was later associated with shakespeare's plays he did an extensive tour of Italy when he was in his mid-20s including most of the cities that are featured in Shakespeare's plays we know that one of the primary influences on Shakespeare is Ovid's metamorphoses and there was a particular translation of Ovid's metamorphoses that Shakespeare seems to have been very fond of and there are echoes of it again and again and works and this translation was translated by Arthur Golding who just happened to be Oxford's uncle and Oxford and Golding were living in the same household at the time that Golding was working on this translation and speaking of Ovid's metamorphoses as I mentioned the first work published under the name William Shakespeare was the narrative poem Venus and Adonis based on a story by Ovid now what you see here on the left is a painting of the Venus and Adonis story by the great Venetian writer Titian a painter I mean Venetian painter Titian and he had several different versions of this some that were a little bit different from each other a few of the copies of this were in the possession of the king of Spain there's one that's really quite different from all the others and it's this one because as you can see Adonis is wearing a type of hat called a bonnet so I'm going to go back that's the earlier one here's the one with the bonnet and that was in Titian Stu in Venice and it's interesting that Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis has a reference to Adonis wearing a bonnet which suggests that the author may have been inspired by this particular painting which he could have only seen in Venice and we don't have any evidence of the Stratford man ever leaving England we know that Oxford spent about 10 months of his life in Venice that was basically his headquarters when he was touring Italy so he very likely might have had entree to Titian studio and seeing that on the left here we have a picture of an actor playing Polonius in Hamlet and it's long been recognized that in many ways Polonius is a caricature or a satire of William Cecil Lord Burleigh who was probably the most powerful man in England during Elizabeth's time he was Queen Elizabeth's right-hand man he had his own spy network and of course you may remember in Hamlet that Polonius sends a servant to go spy on his son while he's away at school and Burleigh did exactly the same thing when his son was away at school sent one of his servants to go spy on him see what he was up to well so did Oxford know Lord Burleigh well as a matter of fact when Oxford was 12 his father died and he became a ward of the Queen and he was sent to live in Lord burly's household so yes you might say he knew him not only that but later on he married Lord burly's daughter and sessile and soberly was his father-in-law so they had a lifelong relationship and not a very easy one because there were very different personalities and there they butted heads with each other quite often on the Left we have some pirates and you may recall that there's a plot twist in Hamlet where Hamlet is captured by pirates and left naked on the shore of Denmark well Oxford when he was crossing the English Channel was captured by pirates who left him naked on the shore of England probably just a coincidence then there's a famous line in Hamlet young men falling out at tennis which is probably a reference to a quarrel famous quarrel that occurred between Oxford and Sir Philip Sidney now Oxford and Sir Philip Sidney were big rivals they disagreed on poetry and drama and politics and a lot of things and one day Sidney was playing tennis with some of his friends an Oxford came along and asked if he could join in and Sidney just ignored him at first not a good move because Oxford outranked him so anyway eventually it got into a verbal altercation and Oxford ended up calling Sidney a puppy so of course so Philip Sidney went to war he died a hero he was buried as a national hero Oxford could not make fun of him openly but he could make fun of him covertly in the plays and for example Sir Andrew aguecheek in Twelfth Night is probably a very mean satire on Sir Philip Sidney Sir Philip Sidney had pop marks from the ague and so that would be where the egg ug came from and of course Sir Andrew aguecheek is a fop and a dandy which Sir Philip Sidney was probably not at least his friends would have said so but that's the way Oxford saw him and there are other characters in Shakespeare's plays that are probably satire sawed Sir Philip Sidney his great rival on the left here we have Henry Risley who is the who was the 3rd Earl of Southampton and this is the person to whom the two long narrative poems venus and adonis and the rape of Lucretia are expressly dedicated his name is on the title page and um he also maybe it's not as clear he may be the fair youth that is addressed in the sonnets now the sonnets don't say specifically that it's him like the other two poems do but that that is probably a plausible guess well now why would Oscar it if he were Shakespeare why would he have written these sonnets to Southampton well as it turns out around the time the sonnets were probably written early 1590s Southampton will as being put forth as a husband to Oxford's eldest daughter and of course she was lured burly's granddaughter Lord Burleigh was very much pushing South Hampton to to marry Oxford's daughter so it makes a lot more sense to think that Oxford would have written these poems to Southampton than to think that the Stratford man would have written them as you may recall the first seventeen sonnets are all urging the young man to get married so that's exactly what was going on around that time the devil can cite scripture for his own purpose that is of course a line from Merchant of Venice and that picture of the book that you see there that is Oxford's Geneva Bible which is now residing in the Folger library in DC and Oxford made a lot of notations in that Bible and a scholar named Roger Strittmatter several years ago wrote his PhD dissertation on correlations between biblical references in Shakespeare's plays and Oxford's notations in his Geneva Bible and what he found was that the more often a biblical passage is referred to in Shakespeare's plays the more likely it is to have been something that Oxford underlined or made a notation about in his Geneva Bible King Lear well now as you know King Lear gave his kingdom to his three daughters while he lived which turned out not to be a good move and well Oxford had three daughters but that's hardly a strong coincidence lots of people have three daughters but there actually is a bit of a more of a parallel to it than that because Oxford had to put his family estate in trust for the benefit of his three daughters while he lived somewhat similar to what Lear did that Easter manola is the name of the characters the father of Kate and Bianca in Taming of the Shrew well where did Shakespeare get that name well just as a coincidence when Oxford was traveling in Italy he borrowed money from two men one was named Baptista Negroni and the other was named pasquina Spinola so it suggests that Oxford might have taken these names and kind of squished them together and come up with the name Baptista Manola who is also a rich man that's why people wanted to marry his daughters in Taming of the Shrew Merchant of Venice Antonio the merchant borrows 3,000 ducats from the moneylender so that Bassanio pictured here played by Joseph Fiennes can marry Portia Oxford borrowed not three thousand ducats but three thousand pounds from a moneylender named not but Michael Locke so that he could send ships to look for a Passage to India through the northwest which they didn't find by the way and finally this is from The Winter's Tale you may recall that there's a statue of Queen Hermione that is shown in that play and someone remarks on it that it's a piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master Giulio Romano now Giulio Romano is the only artist who's mentioned in all of Shakespeare's works and many critics have gotten on Shakespeare's case since then and said wait a minute Shakespeare did not know his Italian masters because Giulio Romano was a painter not a sculptor except Shakespeare was right and they were wrong Giulio Romano was not just a painter he was also a sculptor here is one of his sculptures on a tomb in Mantua which is an area that was along the line of travels that Oxford would have been traveling when he was in Italy now people have asked me this why does it matter who writes Shakespeare uh and I can understand I can understand that feeling you know you can read the works and not really think about who wrote them not have to know anything about him and you can still get a lot out of them but I think that the answer to this was very well summed up by Michael della white is a professor at Washington State University and he says if you get Shakespeare wrong you get literature wrong and probably you get the very phenomenon of Kriya Vivat Iran because the Stratfor Tian's and the Oxford Ian's have very opposing views about how these works were created to the Stratfor Tian's it's all just something that came into his head he just wrote wrote what he thought and didn't have to go back and cross anything out well actually it's not true that nothing had to be crossed out I mean there are different versions of many of the places you've heard of first quarto in second Porto some of these plays there are different versions that conflict with each other quite a bit we have three different versions of Hamlet so obviously these were revised but also to the Stratfor Tian's the creation of these plays was kind of an impersonal act you know didn't really have anything to do with him was all out of his imagination and it's a really no sweat no labor involved Oxford Ian's think that yes imagination is important part of creating these works but Oxford also was pouring his heart and soul into these plays he was talking about his disappointments about his triumphs about his fears about his sins a lot of the time a lot of times he seems to be trying to expiate some of his sins that he committed when he was in his younger days so you may hear people say that writers write what they know well according to the Stratfor Dean's the exception to that is Shakespeare but to the Oxford Ian's that is that is true of Oxford he was writing what he knew his experience his vast education and his imagination as well were poured into these plays and and that's why it's important to understand who actually wrote them now there are a few books you might want to follow up on and by the way I'm going to pass out a list that has a some websites and some books that you can can look at if you want to follow up on this this is a good book Shakespeare by another name that's about a 400 page biography of Oxford as Shakespeare written by Mark Anderson very good shakespeare's guide to italy written by Richard Rowe doesn't really mention the Oxford theory but he talks about going back to Italy he fought in Italy and or two he goes back there with the copies of the Shakespeare plays in hand and he finds actual places that the author had to be talking about that are still there and he really makes the point that Shakespeare knew Italy very intimately and a lot of the details of Italy are in his plays and then alias Shakespeare by Joseph Sobran also a very good book a bit shorter than the Mark Anderson book but a good explanation of the Oxfordian theory and I'd like to end with a quotation from Sigmund Freud and this is something that Freud wrote shortly after reading a Thomas Loney's book Shakespeare identified which as I said was published in 1920 and Sigmund Freud said I no longer believed that the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him the man of Stratford seems to have nothing at all to justify his claim whereas Oxford has almost everything thank you

Channel: Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship

Views: 65,885

Keywords: William Shakespeare, Shakespeare Authorship Question, Edward de Vere

Id: OpFXD07_NYg

Length: 56min 20sec (3380 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 31 2016