The Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship contends that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. While historians and literary scholars overwhelmingly reject alternative authorship candidates, including Oxford,, quoting William Hunt: "No, absolutely no competent student of the period, historical or literary, has ever taken this theory seriously. First of all, the founding premise is false – there is nothing especially mysterious about William Shakespeare, who is as well documented as one could expect of a man of his time. None of his contemporaries or associates expressed any doubt about the authorship of his poems and plays. Nothing about De Vere (Oxford) suggests he had any great talent, and there is no reason to suppose he would have suppressed any talents he possessed.". public interest in the Oxfordian theory continues. After the 1920s, the Oxfordian theory became the most popular alternative Shakespeare authorship theory.
The convergence of documentary evidence of the type used by academics for authorial attribution – title pages, testimony by other contemporary poets and historians, and official records – sufficiently establishes Shakespeare's authorship for the overwhelming majority of Shakespeare scholars and literary historians,:. and no such documentary evidence links Oxford to Shakespeare's works. Oxfordians, however, reject the historical record and claim that circumstantial evidence supports Oxford’s authorship, proposing that the contradictory historical evidence is part of a conspiracy that falsified the record to protect the identity of the real author.. Scholarly literary specialists consider the Oxfordian method of interpreting the plays and poems as grounded in an autobiographical fallacy, and argue that using his works to infer and construct a hypothetical author's biography is both unreliable and logically unsound.: "Their [Oxfordians'] favorite code is the hidden personal allusion ... But this method is in essence no different from the cryptogram, since Shakespeare's range of characters and plots, both familial and political, is so vast that it would be possible to find in the plays 'self-portraits' of, once more, anybody one cares to think of.": "It has more than once been claimed that the combination of 'biographical-fit' and cryptographical arguments could be used to establish a case for almost any individual ... The very fact that their application has produced so many rival claimants demonstrates their unreliability.": "in voicing dissatisfaction over the apparent lack of continuity between the certain facts of Shakespeare's life and the spirit of his literary output, anti-Stratfordians adopt the very Modernist assumption that an author's work must reflect his or her life. Neither Shakespeare nor his fellow Elizabethan writers operated under this assumption.": "... deriving an idea of an author from his or her works is always problematic, particularly in a multi-vocal genre like drama, since it crucially underestimates the heterogeneous influences and imaginative reaches of creative writing."
Oxfordian arguments rely heavily on biographical allusions; adherents find correspondences between incidents and circumstances in Oxford's life and events in Shakespeare's plays, sonnets, and longer poems. The case also relies on perceived parallels of language, idiom, and thought between Shakespeare's works and Oxford's own poetry and letters. Oxfordians claim that marked passages in Oxford's Bible can be linked to Biblical allusions in Shakespeare's plays. That no plays survive under Oxford's name is also important to the Oxfordian theory.. Oxfordians interpret certain 16th- and 17th-century literary allusions as indicating that Oxford was one of the more prominent suppressed anonymous and/or pseudonymous writers of the day. Under this scenario, Shakespeare was either a "front man" or "play-broker" who published the plays under his own name or was merely an actor with a similar name, misidentified as the playwright since the first Shakespeare biographies of the early 1700s.
The most compelling evidence against the Oxfordian theory is de Vere's death in 1604, since the generally accepted chronology of Shakespeare's plays places the composition of approximately twelve of the plays after that date. Oxfordians respond that the annual publication of "new" or "corrected" Shakespeare plays stopped in 1604, and that the dedication to Shakespeare's Sonnets implies that the author was dead prior to their publication in 1609. Oxfordians believe the reason so many of the "late plays" show evidence of revision and collaboration is because they were completed by other playwrights after Oxford's death.
History of the Oxfordian theory The theory that the works of Shakespeare were in fact written by someone other than William Shakespeare dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. In 1857, the first book on the topic, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, by Delia Bacon, was published. Bacon proposed the first "group theory" of Shakespearian authorship, attributing the works to a committee headed by Francis Bacon and including Walter Raleigh. De Vere is mentioned once in the book, in a list of "high-born wits and poets", who were associated with Raleigh. Some commentators have interpreted this to imply that he was part of the group of authors... Throughout the 19th century Bacon was the preferred hidden author. Oxford is not known to have been mentioned again in this context.
By the beginning of the twentieth century other candidates, typically aristocrats, were put forward, most notably Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland, and William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby. Oxford's candidacy as sole author was first proposed by J. Thomas Looney in his 1920 book Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.. Following earlier anti-Stratfordians, Looney argued that the known facts of Shakespeare's life did not fit the personality he ascribed to the author of the plays. Like other anti-Stratfordians before him, Looney referred to the absence of records concerning Shakespeare's education, his limited experience of the world, his allegedly poor handwriting skills (evidenced in his signatures), and the "dirt and ignorance" of Stratford at the time. Shakespeare had a petty "acquisitive disposition", he said, while the plays made heroes of free-spending figures.. They also portrayed middle and lower-class people negatively, while Shakespearian heroes were typically aristocratic. Looney referred to scholars who found in the plays evidence that their author was an expert in law, widely read in ancient Latin literature, and could speak French and Italian. Looney believed that even very early works such as Love's Labour's Lost implied that he was already a person of "matured powers", in his forties or fifties, with wide experience of the world.. Looney considered that Oxford's personality fitted the one he deduced from the plays, and he also identified characters in the plays as detailed portraits of Oxford's family and personal contacts. Several characters, including Hamlet and Bertram (in All's Well that Ends Well), were, he believed, self-portraits. Adapting arguments earlier used for Rutland and Derby, Looney fitted events in the plays to episodes in Oxford's life, including his travels to France and Italy, the settings for many plays. Oxford's death in 1604 was linked to a drop-off in the publication of Shakespeare plays. Looney declared that the late play The Tempest was not written by Oxford, and that others performed or published after Oxford's death were most probably left incomplete and finished by other writers, thus explaining the apparent idiosyncrasies of style found in the late Shakespeare plays. Looney also introduced the argument that the reference to the "ever-living poet" in the 1609 dedication to Shakespeare's sonnets implied that the author was dead at the time of publication.
Sigmund Freud, the novelist Marjorie Bowen, and several 20th-century celebrities found the thesis persuasive,Michell, John. Who Wrote Shakespeare? London: Thames & Hudson, 1996. pp. 162–64 and Oxford soon overtook Bacon as the favoured alternative candidate to Shakespeare, though academic Shakespearians mostly ignored the subject. Looney's theory attracted a number of activist followers who published books supplementing his own and added new arguments, most notably Percy Allen, Bernard M. Ward, Louis P. Bénézet and Charles Wisner Barrell. Mainstream scholar Steven W. May has noted that Oxfordians of this period made genuine contributions to knowledge of Elizabethan history, citing "Ward's quite competent biography of the Earl" and "Charles Wisner Barrell's identification of Edward Vere, Oxford's illegitimate son by Anne Vavasour" as examples. In 1921, Sir George Greenwood, Looney, and others founded The Shakespeare Fellowship, an organization originally dedicated to the discussion and promotion of ecumenical anti-Stratfordian views, but which later became devoted to promoting Oxford as the true Shakespeare.
Decline and revival After a period of decline of the Oxfordian theory beginning with World War II, in 1952 Dorothy and Charlton Greenwood Ogburn published the 1,300-page This Star of England, which briefly revived Oxfordism. A series of critical academic books and articles, however, held in check any appreciable growth of anti-Stratfordism and Oxfordism, most notably The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined (1957), by William and Elizebeth Friedman, The Poacher from Stratford (1958), by Frank Wadsworth, Shakespeare and His Betters (1958), by Reginald Churchill, The Shakespeare Claimants (1962), by H. N. Gibson, and Shakespeare and his Rivals: A Casebook on the Authorship Controversy (1962), by George L. McMichael and Edgar M. Glenn. By 1968 the newsletter of The Shakespeare Oxford Society reported that "the missionary or evangelical spirit of most of our members seems to be at a low ebb, dormant, or non-existent".Quoted in . In 1974, membership in the society stood at 80. In 1979, the publication of an analysis of the Ashbourne portrait dealt a further blow to the movement. The painting, long claimed to be one of the portraits of Shakespeare, but considered by Barrell to be an overpaint of a portrait of the Earl of Oxford, turned out to represent neither, but rather depicted Hugh Hamersley.
Charlton Ogburn Jr., was elected president of The Shakespeare Oxford Society in 1976 and kick-started the modern revival of the Oxfordian movement by seeking publicity through moot court trials, media debates, television and later the Internet, including Wikipedia, methods which became standard for Oxfordian and anti-Stratfordian promoters because of their success in recruiting members of the lay public. He portrayed academic scholars as self-interested members of an "entrenched authority" that aimed to "outlaw and silence dissent in a supposedly free society", and proposed to counter their influence by portraying Oxford as a candidate on equal footing with Shakespeare.
In 1985 Ogburn published his 900-page The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Myth and the Reality, with a Foreword by Pulitzer prize-winning historian David McCullough who wrote: "[T]his brilliant, powerful book is a major event for everyone who cares about Shakespeare. The scholarship is surpassing—brave, original, full of surprise... The strange, difficult, contradictory man who emerges as the real Shakespeare, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, is not just plausible but fascinating and wholly believable."
By framing the issue as one of fairness in the atmosphere of conspiracy that permeated America after Watergate, he used the media to circumnavigate academia and appeal directly to the public. Ogburn's efforts secured Oxford the place as the most popular alternative candidate.; ;; .