Experts!

People have been questioning Shakespeare's authorship for longer than you may have thought! The very first skeptic began doubting around 1785, and others include Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Mark Twain, Orson Welles, Sigmund Freud... and Keanu Reeves!

More from those who know more:


subtopic 1: WHY IT WASN'T WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

-- "... as an attorney, I find Shakespeare's will most telling. The original document survives, is three pages long and lists specific bequests. Among the items mentioned are a sword, a silver-gilt bowl and his 'second best bed.' There is not mention of the plays or poems which made him rich and famous. No mention of books, no mention of the Globe Theatre." - Joseph Racioppi, writer and attorney

--Dr. James Wilmot, a clergyman who could be considered the very first anti-Stratfordian, couldn't find any books or manuscripts written by Shakespeare. (This was around 1785).

-- "Shakspere [William Shakespeare was baptized Gulielmus Shakspere] at best had only a grammar school education, and he is not known to have traveled beyond Stratford and London... How, say skeptics, could he have accumulated the vast knowledge of royalty, court life, politics and foreign lands - particularly Italy, where several plays are set - woven through such a sophisticated body of work? Whoever wrote the plays and sonnets had a rare breadth of knowledge in numerous disciplines, including physical sciences, medicine, the law, astronomy, and the Bible." - Lewis Lord, author of "Mysteries of History: Mortal Secrets," published in U.S. News & World Report.

-- Six years after Shakspere/Shakespeare died, Henry Peacham published The Compleat Gentleman (1616), which listed the greatest poets of the Elizabethan era (when Shakespeare lived). Shakespeare, in any variation of spelling, is nowhere to be found in this or three subsequent editions. Edward de Vere, however, heads the list!


subtopic 2: HOW DE VERE'S BACKGROUND INDICATES THAT HE WAS THE AUTHOR

--Mark Rylance, playwright and artistic director of the Globe and leader of its exploration into the authorship question, has said, "With Oxford, what I've read - the comparisons of his life to Hamlet's life, the wildness, the fact that he's very much complimented for comedy - I find it difficult... to... remove Oxford from the writing of these plays."

-- Sigmund Freud, who often looked at Shakespearean works for psychological insights, wrote, "The man from Stratford seems to have nothing to justify his claim, whereas Oxford has almost everything."

-- William S. Niederkorn, playwright and an editor a The New York Times, wrote, in an article that discusses the authorship controversy, of J. Thomas Looney. Looney was a grammar and high school teacher in England who could be considered the first Oxfordian, having suggested de Vere to be the author in 1920. W.S. Niederkorn writes: "J. Thomas Looney... could not reconcile the traditional image of the Stratford figure with the noble Renaissance man he saw behind the plays. Looney made a list of characteristics he expected Shakespeare to have, then perused the works of Elizabethan poets for a writer whose style, language and use of poetic form had something in common with Shakespeare's. He found only one: Oxford."

In Looney's book Shakespeare Identified (1920), Niederkorn writes that "Looney states that in one category after another Oxford had the characteristics he had projected: classical education, sympathy for the House of Lancaster in the War of the Roses, Roman Catholic learnings, aristocratic point of view, literary tastes, a love-hate attitude toward women, knowledge of Italy, and interests in drama, music and sports."


subtopic 3 - A PSEUDONYM FOR DE VERE (THE WHAT AND THE WHY)

-- Lewis Lord writes, "Playwrights were... held in low esteem because public theaters like the Globe were the rowdy province of commoners, the audiences laced with prostitutes, cutpurses, drunkards, and scoundrels of every stripe." De Vere could have needed a pseudonym for this reason alone.

-- Joseph Sobran, in his book Alias Shakespeare (1997), explains that the Shakespearean sonnets may have started out as a playful way to get the Earl of Southampton to marry de Vere's daughter, but became homoerotic. (Thus, de Vere could have had this reason for an alias - at that time, homosexual affairs were criminal.)


subtopic 4 - THE GENEVA BIBLE! CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE THAT DE VERE WAS THE AUTHOR?

-- Dr Stritmatter, who recieved his Ph.D in comparative literature, conducted a study on de Vere's copy of the Geneva Bible. He is a member of the Shakespeare Oxford Society. He used handwriting analysis and forensics to conclude that it is quite probable that Edward de Vere wrote the annotations in the Bible.

-- De Vere purchased this Bible in 1570. Thematic parallels and specific wording from Shakespearean works are marked and annotated in the Bible.

-- As he was using scholarly writings on biblical references in Shakespeare while studying the Geneva Bible, Dr. Stritmatter says that, "one by one, I began to tick off a growing list of verses marking in the de Vere Bible which these scholars had identified as influential on Shakespeare."

-- According to Stritmatter, of the biblical references in Shakespeare that are cited by writers on the topic, 10 Psalms and 158 verses were marked in the de Vere Bible.

-- Mr. Stritmatter feels that the Bible proves the Oxfordian case.

-- Some, like Alan H. Nelson (a professor at the University of California at Berkeley), feels that the handwriting of the annotations in the Geneva Bible are not in de Vere's handwriting, and so, these people are not convinced by the alleged"proof." To this, Dr. Stritmatter contends, "Why would one of the richest peers of the realm buy a used and marked-up Bible?"


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Are you not convinced yet? Perhaps you agree with the Stratfordians, who argue that Oxfordians are snobs for thinking that Shakespeare couldn't have written the works because of his background. If that is the case, then consider what Mr. Wright, a member of the Shakespeare Oxford Society and a professor of English at Concordia University) had to say:

"The Stratford myth... tells students who themselves would be writers, 'you'll never be a great writer like Shakespeare. Shakespeare only accomplished what he did because he was s genius. And absent such genius, you have no hope for the future.' ... And in any other discipline... could there be such an anti-intellectual, anti-educational myth as this that would not be derisively dismissed as an offensive against the very raison d’être of the educational enterprise?"