Shakespeare Authorship Essay Research Paper For a

Shakespeare Authorship Essay, Research Paper

For a host of persuasive but commonly disregarded reasons, the Earl of

Oxford has quietly become by far the most compelling man to be found

behind the mask of “Shake-speare.” As Orson Welles put it in 1954, “I

think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t agree, there are some

awful funny coincidences incidences to explain away.” Some of these

coincidences are obscure, others are hard to overlook. A 1578 Latin

encomium to Oxford, for example, contains some highly suggestive

praise: “Pallas lies concealed in thy right hand,” it says. “Thine eyes

flash fire; Thy countenance shakes spears.” Elizabethans knew that

Pallas Athena was known by the sobriquet “the spear-shaker.” The hyphen

in Shake-speare’s name also was a tip-off: other Elizabethan pseudonyms

include “Cutbert Curry-knave,” “Simon Smell-knave,” and “Adam

Fouleweather (student in asse-tronomy).”(FN*).

The case for Oxford’s authorship hardly rests on hidden clues and

allusions, however. One of the most important new pieces of Oxfordian

evidence centers around a 1570 English Bible, in the “Geneva

translation,” once owned and annotated by the Earl of Oxford, Edward de

Vere. In an eight-year study of the de Vere Bible, a University of

Massachusetts doctoral student named Roger Stritmatter has found that

the 430-year-old book is essentially, as he puts it, “Shake-speare’s

Bible with the Earl of Oxford’s coat of arms on the cover.” Stritmatter

discovered that more than a quarter of the 1,066 annotations and marked

passages in the de Vere Bible 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.

In his research, Stritmatter pioneered a stylistic-fingerprinting

technique that involves isolating an author’s most prominent biblical

allusions–those that appear four or more times in the author’s canon.

After compiling a list of such “diagnostic verses” for the writings of

Shake-speare and three of his most celebrated literary

contemporaries–Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edmund

Spenser–Stritmatter undertook a comparative study to discern how

meaningful the de Vere Bible evidence was. He found that each author’s

favorite biblical allusions composed a unique and idiosyncratic set and

could thus be marshaled to distinguish one author from another.

Stritmatter then compared each set of “diagnostics” to the marked

passages in the de Vere Bible. The results were, from any perspective

but the most dogmatically orthodox, a stunning confirmation of the

Oxfordian theory.

Stritmatter found that very few of the marked verses in the de Vere

Bible appeared in Spenser’s, Marlowe’s, or Bacon’s diagnostic verses.

On the other hand, the Shake-speare canon brims with de Vere Bible

verses. Twenty-nine of Shake-speare’s top sixty-six biblical allusions

are marked in the de Vere Bible. Furthermore, three of Shake-speare’s

diagnostic verses show up in Oxford’s extant letters. All in all, the

correlation between Shake-speare’s favorite biblical verses and Edward

de Vere’s Bible is very high: .439 compared with .054, .068, and .020

for Spenser, Marlowe, and Bacon. Was “Shake-speare” the pen name for

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or must we formulate ever more

elaborate hypotheses that preserve the old byline but ignore the appeal

of common sense and new evidence.

One favorite rejoinder to the Oxfordian argument is that the author’s

identity doesn’t really matter; only the works do. “The play’s the

thing” has become the shibboleth of indifference-claiming doubters.

These four words, however, typify Shake-speare’s attitude toward the

theater about as well as the first six words of A Tale of Two Cities

express Charles Dickens’s opinion of the French Revolution: “It was the

best of times.” In both cases, the fragment suggests an authorial

perspective very different from the original context.

“The play’s the thing,” Hamlet says, referring to his masque “The

Mouse-trap,” “wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” Hardly a

pr cis for advocating the death of the author, Hamlet’s observation

reports that drama’s function comes closer to espionage than to mere

entertainment. Hamlet’s full quote is, in fact, a fair summary of the

Oxfordian reading of the entire cannon. If pressed, Shake-speare, like

Hamlet, would probably deny a play’s topical relevance. But, as an

ambitious courtier, he would have valued his dramaturgical ability to

comment on, lampoon, vilify, and praise people and events at Queen

Elizabeth’s court. It is hard to deny that Hamlet is the closest

Shake-speare comes to a picture of the dramatist at work.

Nowadays, assertions that one can recover the author’s perspective fro

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