Real Author Of Shakespeares Plays example essay topic

As it is written in the edition, the first man explicitly to believe that Shakespeares works were written by someone else was the Reverend James Wilmot (1726-1808), a Warwickshire clergyman who lived near Stratford. Wilmots doubts were aroused by his inability to find a single book belonging to Shakespeare despite searching in every old private library within a fifty-mile radius of Stratford. He was also unable to locate any authentic anecdotes about Shakespeare in or around Stratford. Wilmots father, like him an Oxford graduate, was a gentleman of Warwick. He might well have met persons who knew Shakespeare, and could certainly have known those who had met his surviving daughters, yet he too had evidently heard nothing about him from any local source. From this and other evidence, Wilmot concluded that the real author of Shakespeares plays was Sir Francis Bacon, whose activities, it seemed, provided much of the knowledge of court life and politics found in the plays.

Wilmots claims, which encompassed virtually everything said by subsequent anti-Stratfordian, remained unknown until 1932. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, a number of writers independently concluded that Bacon wrote Shakespeares plays. Chief among them was an American, coincidentally named Delia Bacon, who, in 1857, published the earliest book expounding this theory, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare. By the late nineteenth century, works propounding the Bacon-was-Shakespeare theory had proliferated, though generally they did their cause more harm than good, being chiefly based on alleged secret codes and ciphers in the plays proving that Bacon was the author. The tide of Bacon ians receded sharply in the twentieth century, as Shakespeare studies became overwhelmingly centered in university English departments. Here, the anti-Stratfordian position is associated with non-academic autodidacts and crackpots; the idea that a serious scholar would take up such a position is viewed as ludicrous.

Nevertheless, the anti-Stratfordian cause widened to include other Shakespeare claimants besides Bacon and, in the last twenty years, has made a comeback, especially in the United States, enjoying certain respectability even in some academic circles. Wells and Taylor were largely argued upon their trial to give a clear answer to the question ahead. So, if not Shakespeare of Stratford, then who? Probably the strongest candidate is Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), whose biography as the putative author of Shakespeares plays appears almost too good to be true. Inheritor of the senior earldom in England, and as such hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain, he was educated at Cambridge and studied law at Grays Inn.

Brought up in the household of Lord Burghley (1520-98), his future father-in-law, with its library of nearly 3,000 books, he was tutored by his uncle Arthur Golding, the translator of O vids Metamorphoses, from which many of Shakespeares plays are derived. Oxford traveled on the Continent, spending a year in Italy. He was known in his lifetime as a successful playwright and poet, although little of his work survives, and the surviving poems in his own name stop soon after the name Shake-speared (as he was often known) first appeared in print. He held a lease on Blackfriars Theatre and had his own acting company, although much of his life remains a mystery.

In 1605 Oxfords daughter was married to the Earl of Montgomery, to whom the First Folio was jointly dedicated (along with William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke). The case for was first made in 1920 by a schoolmaster, John Thomas Looney, in a work entitled Shakespeare Identified. Looney's book was praised by a host of enthusiasts who gradually made Oxford the most popular of the Shakespeare claimants, replacing Bacon. The most convincing evidence for the Oxford claim and what is really firming Wells and Taylors main argument emerges from the Sonnets, which seem to many to be related to incidents in the authors life, although precisely what these were is a complete mystery. The Sonnets were first published in 1609, in a limited edition with an inscrutable dedication about which more has been written than anything of its kind in the Shakespeare canon. Many historians believe that they were written in the early 1590's (or even before).

Certainly in 1598 a London schoolmaster commented on Shakespeares sug red Sonnets among his private friends. The 1609 edition of the Sonnets includes a series of recommendations from the poet, apparently to an aristocrat, to marry and father children. Most historians believe that the addressee was Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton (1573-1624), to whom Shakespeare dedicated his poems Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucre ce in 1594. Sonnet 10 asks the man addressed to Make thee another self for love of me. Many of the Sonnets speak of the poet as old and lame, and as one who has recently suffered shame and ignominy. The homoerotic nature of some of the early Sonnets remains a highly controversial point.