The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

The evidence for Shakespeare of Stratford not being the author of the plays is, essentially, the lack of evidence that he was the author of the plays. Aside from a birth certificate, some legal documents, and a fleeting mention in contemporary chronicles next to nothing is known about Wm. Shakespeare, Esq. His death in 1616 was a non-event outside Stratford, to which he had returned after his career as a comic actor, friend of criminal lowlifes (the Elizabeth/Stuart state was excellent at recording wrongdoings) and manager of the Globe Theatre in London. His life—and this is the killer argument, for the Shakespeare conspiracists—is almost impossible to square with the literary brilliance and erudition of the Shakespeare plays, which are rich in allusions to classical literature, much of it actually only available in the Classical languages of Greek and Latin. The books are full of Cambridge University slang, show a deep knowledge of the law, display a knowledge of foreign countries (north Italy especially) and a ready familiarity with the mores and tropes of the aristocracy, down to the technical terminology of falconry. None of this makes sense if the plays were penned by William Shakespere, son of a glover from a backwater Midlands town, the staple trade of which was sheep-selling. This line of reasoning was first developed by J. Thomas Looney in “Shakespeare” Identified as far back as 1920 (see Document, p.479).

Edward de Vere, on the other hand, studied law at Cambridge, travelled much, was a first-rate poet and supported a theatre company. The sonnets attributed to Shakespeare are heavy ammunition on de Vere’s behalf, because they reference his life, and contain anagrams (the Elizabethans loved riddles) that identify him. The lines “That every word doth almost tell my name” from Sonnet 76 being the prime case; “every word” is almost exactly an anagram of “Edward Vere”.

One difficulty in establishing the identity of Shakespeare is that even orthodox scholars agree that not all the plays in the canon are his own work; Titus Andronicus is a reheat of another play. Hence Ben Johnson slyly referring to Shakespeare as “Poet-Ape, that would be thought our chief”.

Quite plausibly, William Shakespeare the Bard was not William Shakespeare of Stratford. The vocabulary in the plays is twice that of any writer in English, comprising as many as 29,000 words. The man who died in Stratford in 1616 did not, according to his extremely detailed will, leave a single book. Would the fertile, enquiring mind that conjured the Prince of Denmark, Henry V at Agincourt, the mischievous Puck not have possessed a single cowskin- covered tome at home?

Further reading:

H. N. Gibson, The Shakespeare Claimants, 2005

John Michell, Who wrote Shakespeare?, 1996

DOCUMENT: J. THOMAS LOONEY, “SHAKESPEAR”’ IDENTIFIED IN EDWARD DE VERE, THE SEVENTEENTH EARL OF OXFORD, 1920 [EXTRACT]

It is hardly necessary to insist at the present day that Shakespeare has preserved for all time, in living human characters, much of what was best worth remembering and retaining in the social relationship of the Feudal order of the Middle Ages. Whatever conclusion we may have to come to about his religion, it is undeniable that, from the social and political point of view, Shakespeare is essentially a medievalist. The following sentence from Carlyle may be taken as representative of much that might be quoted from several writers bearing in the same direction: “As Dante the Italian man was sent into our world to embody musically the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe, its Inner Life; so Shakespeare we may say embodies for us the Outer Life of our Europe as developed then, its chivalries, courtesies, humours, ambitions, what practical way of thinking, acting, looking at the world, men then had.”

When, therefore, we find that the great Shakespearean plays were written at a time when men were revelling in what they considered to be a newly-found liberation from Medievalism, it is evident that Shakespeare was one whose sympathies, and probably his antecedents, linked him on more closely to the old order than to the new: not the kind of man we should expect to rise from the lower middle-class population of the towns. Whether as a lord or a dependent we should expect to find him one who saw life habitually from the standpoint of Feudal relationships in which he had been born and bred: and in view of what has been said of his education it would, of course, be as lord rather than as a dependent that we should expect to meet him.

It might be, however, that he was only linked to Shakespearean Feudalism by cherished family traditions; a surviving Aristocrat, representative, maybe, of some decayed family. A close inspection of his work, however, reveals a more intimate personal connection with aristocracy than would be furnished by mere family tradition. Kings and queens, earls and countesses, knights and ladies move on and off his stage “as to the manner born”. They are no mere tinselled models representing mechanically the class to which they belong, but living men and women. It is rather his ordinary “citizens” that are the automata walking woodenly on to the stage to speak for their class. His “lower-orders” never display that virile dignity and largeness of character which poets like Burns, who know the class from within, portray in their writings. Even Scott comes much nearer to truth in this matter than does Shakespeare. It is, therefore, not merely his power of representing royalty and the nobility in vital, passionate characters, but his failure to do the same in respect to other classes that marks Shakespeare as a member of the higher aristocracy. The defects of the playwriter become in this instance more illuminating and instructive than do his qualities. Genius may undoubtedly enable a man to represent with some fidelity classes to which he does not belong; it will hardly at the same time weaken his power of representing truly his own class. In a great dramatic artist we demand universality of power within his province; but he shows that catholicity, not by representing human society in all its forms and phases, but by depicting our common human nature in the entire range of its multiple and complex forces; and he does this best when he shows us that human nature at work in the classes with which he is most intimate. The suggestion of an aristocratic author for the plays is, therefore, the simple common sense of the situation, and is no more in opposition to modern democratic tendencies, as one writer loosely hints, than the belief that William Shakespeare was indebted to aristocratic patrons and participated in the enclosure of common lands.

An aristocratic outlook upon life marks the plays of other dramatists of the time besides Shakespeare. These were known, however, in most cases to have been university men, with a pronounced contempt for the particular class to which William Shakspere of Stratford belonged. It is a curious fact, however, that a writer like Creizenach, who seems never to doubt the Stratfordian view, nevertheless recognizes that “Shakespeare” was more purely and truly aristocratic in his outlook than were the others. In a word, the plays which are recognized as having the most distinct marks of aristocracy about them, are supposed to have been produced by the playwright furthest removed from aristocracy in his origin and antecedents.

We feel entitled, therefore, to claim for Shakespeare high social rank, and even a close proximity to royalty itself.

Assuming him to have been an Englishman of the Lancastrian higher aristocracy, we turn now to these parts of his writings that may be said to deal with his own phase of life, namely, his English historical plays, to seek for distinctive traces of position and personality. Putting aside the greater part of the plays Henry VI, Parts I and II, as not being from Shakespeare’s pen, and also the first acts of Henry VI, Part III, for the same reason, we may say that he deals mainly with the troubled period between the upheaval in the reign of Richard II and the ending of the Wars of the Roses by the downfall of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth. The outstanding feature of this work is his pronounced sympathy with the Lancastrian cause.

Even the play of Richard II, which shows a measure of sympathy with the king whom the Lancastrians ousted, is full of Lancastrian partialities. “Shakespeare” had no sympathy with revolutionary movements and the overturning of established governments. Usurpation of sovereignty would, therefore, be repugnant to him, and his aversion is forcibly expressed in the play; but Henry of Lancaster is represented as merely concerned with claiming his rights, desiring to uphold the authority of the crown, but driven by the injustice and perversity of Richard into an antagonism he strove to avoid. Finally, it is the erratic wilfulness of the king, coupled with Henry’s belief that the king had voluntarily abdicated, that induces Bolingbroke to accept the throne. In a word, the play of Richard II is a kind of dramatic apologia for the Lancastrians. Then comes the