Proponents Of Oxford As Shakespeare example essay topic

It is simply inconceivable that, in Elizabethan England, the actor son of a butcher would urge a powerful earl to marry and beget children for love of me. Shakespeare of Stratford was plainly not homosexual: he was married at eighteen and had fathered three children by the age of twenty-one. Moreover, the tone of this Sonnet is utterly different from the flattery and abject self-abasement found elsewhere in Shakespeare's dedications to Southampton. The Sonnets repeatedly demonstrate a familiarity with a range of subjects from classical literature to the aristocratic high life. If they were written around 1592-94, as many believe, it is difficult to see why Shakespeare, who was twenty-eight in 1592, would describe himself as old There is no evidence from any source that he was lame, or that he suffered from shame and ignominy (apart from the attack on him in Robert Greene's posthumous 1592 work Groats worth of Wit); his alleged close association with an earl is evidence that the opposite was true. Although Shakespeare of Stratford dedicated two of his works to Southampton, no direct links between the two men have ever been found, and there is no contemporary evidence (as opposed to anecdotes from much later) that Southampton ever heard of Shakespeare.

Those who believe that the Earl of Oxford was Shakespeare, however, argue that the Sonnets fit his life like a glove. Oxford was born in April 1550, and was thus in his forties when the Sonnets were probably written (Sonnet 2 begins When forty winters shall besiege thy brow). He was, apparently, lame, knew the shame of having been banished from court and of being sent to the Tower (for his involvement with Catholics), and was accused in 1576 by the courtier Charles Arundel of being a bugger er of boys. In 1590 he tried unsuccessfully to arrange a marriage between his daughter Elizabeth (who was also Lord Burghley granddaughter) and Lord Southampton.

Skeptics have suggested a number of alternative explanations to account for the Sonnets and the Oxford edition main argument. Some historians-most notably Katharine M. Wilson, in Shakespeares Sugared Sonnets (1974) -have claimed that they were merely a series of imaginative poems on a number of themes, for whatever reason, proposed to him as subjects to write about. Others have claimed that the Sonnets were autobiographical, but were written as if by Southampton mother (who could ask her son to marry for love of me), or were written in the 1600's rather than in the previous decade, with one of the dedicate es of the First Folio in 1623, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke (1580-1630) in mind, not Lord Southampton. Proponents of Oxford as Shakespeare also claim his identity can be detected in Shakespeares most famous play, Hamlet. They argue that Polonius is a caricature of Lord Burghley, Oxfords father-in-law. As in the case of the Sonnets, it seems improbable that Shakespeare of Stratford would have dared to lampoon Burghley as occurs in the play (where Polonius is stabbed to death by Hamlet).

Ernest Jones, the pioneer psychiatrist, attempted in 1910 to depict Hamlet as suffering from an Oedipus complex, and saw the date of Shakespeares fathers death (September 1601) as significant in the writing of the play. But the differences between the story of Hamlet and Shakespeares life are surely immense and his father was certainly not murdered. Furthermore, Thomas Nashe, a contemporary of Shakespeare, referred in 1589 to whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches, indicating that a play by this name was performed in that year and probably at least a few years earlier. Known to scholars today as Ur-Hamlet, this lost play is often attributed to Thomas Kyd, a playwright mentioned by Thomas Nashe in the same paragraph, although there is no evidence that he was the author. Shakespeares Hamlet was first registered in 1602. He may have borrowed the theme for his play from this earlier drama, but this is unlike his working methods, and some believe that Shakespeare himself, rather than Kyd, was the author of the earlier play.

The problem here is that Shakespeare was only twenty-five in 1589, and younger if the play was written earlier. Proponents of Oxford as Shakespeare argue that many of the plays were actually written much earlier than the normal chronology, beginning in the early 1580's, and point out that there were many Ur plays in circulation, too early for Shakespeare (b. 1564) to have written them, but not too early for Oxford (b. 1550). Numerous other links between Shakespeares plays and Oxford have been postulated.

Oxford invested and lost 3,000 pounds sterling with a London merchant named Michael Lok (or Lock), possibly the prototype of Shylock, which is unknown in Jewish nomenclature. In The Merchant of Venice, Antonio posts bond for 3,000 ducats with Shylock, with a pound of flesh as security.