1. What is the Shakespeare authorship problem? People believe that Shakespeare didn’t right all of his plays, and sonnets. This is a overgeneralization
2. What literary, cultural, and political figures doubt that Shakespeare was the sole author of the work? The people that thought that Shakespreare did not right his plays are, Delia Bacon, Mr. Justice Harry A. Blackmun, Charlie Chaplin, Samuel Clemens, Charles Dickens, Malcolm X, David McCullough, and many others.
3. Make a chronological history of the doubts that surround the authorship
of the Shakespearean canon.
1728 -
Publication of Captain Goulding's Essay Against Too Much Reading in which he
comments on the background Shakespeare would require for his historical plays
and suggests that Shakespeare probably had to keep "one of those chuckle-pated
Historians for his particular Associate...or he might have starvd upon his History."
Goulding tells us that he had this from "one of his (Shakespeare's) intimate
Acquaintance."
1769 -
Publication of The Life and Adventures of Common Sense, an anonymous allegory
which describes a profligate Shakespeare casting "his Eye upon a common
place Book, in which was contained, an Infinite Variety of Modes and Forms,
to express all the different Sentiments of the human Mind, together with Rules
for their Combinations and Connections upon every Subject or Occasion that might
Occur in Dramatic Writing..."
1785 -
Rev. James Wilmot, D.D. attributed authorship to Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam.
1786 -
The Story of the Learned Pig , an anonymous allegory by an "Officer of
the Royal Navy," in which The Pig describes himself as having variously
been a greyhound, deer, bear and a human being (after taking possession of a
body) who worked as horseholder at a playhouse where he met the "Immortal
Shakespeare" who's he reports didn't "run his country for deer-stealing"
and didn't father the various plays, Hamlet, Othello, As You Like It, The Tempest
, and Midsummer's Night Dream. Instead the Pig confesses to be author.
1848 -
In The Romance of Yachting by Joseph C. Hart, a former American consul at Santa
Cruz, provides Considerable anti-Stratfordian opinion. Favors Jonson as probable
author of Shakespeare's plays.
1852 -
August issue of Chambers' Edinburgh Journal contained an anonymous article,
'Who Wrote Shakespeare" The author suggests that Shakespeare "kept
a poet."
1856 -
Bacon is proposed as author of Shakespeare's plays in Putnam's Monthly (January
issue) which contained "Shakespeare and His Plays: An Inquiry Concerning
Them" by Delia Bacon, an American bearing no family relationship to Francis
Bacon.
1857 -
Publication of The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, a book by
Delia Bacon in which she considers the possibility of several authors. Nathanial
Hawthorne helped Delia Bacon publish this book, for which he contributed a preface.
1891/92 -
James Greenstreet, a British archivist, in a series of essays in The Genealogist,
proposed that William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby was author of the Shakespeare
plays.
1892 -
Our English Homer listed several writers as a group who were responsible for
writing Shakespeare's works: Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Nashe, Lodge, Bacon and
others.
1895 -
It Was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries, a novel by Wilbur
Ziegler, proposed that Marlowe, Raleigh, and the Earl of Rutland were authors
of the Shakespearean canon.
1903 -
Henry James in a letter to Miss Violet Hunt says "I am 'a sort of' haunted
by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful
fraud ever practised on a patient world."
1908 -
Sir George Greenwood, scholar and Member of Parliament, exposed the major arguments
and scholarship against the Stratford man as author of the Shakespearean canon
in his book, The Shakespeare Problem Restated, the first in a series of volumes
that Sir George devoted to the subject.
1910 -
Bacon Is Shakespeare by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence (New York, John McBride Co.)
cited arguments that Bacon is Shakespeare and that the following are distinguished
men who perceived "the truth respecting the real authorship of the Plays:"
--Lord Palmerston, British statesman, 1784-1865.
--Lord Houghton, British statesman, 1809-1885 (better known as Richard Monckton
Milnes).
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, British critic and poet, 1772-1834
--John Bright, British statesman, 1811-1889 ("Any man that believes that
William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote Hamlet or Lear is a fool.")
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, American philosopher and poet, 1803-1882
--John Greenlief Whittier, American poet, 1807-1892 ("Whether Bacon wrote
the wonderful plays or not, I am quite sure the man Shakspere neither did nor
could.")
--Dr. W. H. Furness, eminent American scholar and father of the editor of the
Variorum, 1802-1891 ("I am one of the many who have never been able to
bring the life of William Shakepeare and the plays of Shakespeare within planetary
space of each other.")
--Mark Twain, American author and humorist, 1835-1910
--Prince Otto von Bismarck, 1815-1898
1915 -
The Derbyite theory, suggesting that William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby was
the true author behind the Shakespeare name, was revived by Robert Fraser in
The Silent Shakespeare.
1919 -
Abel Lefranc, a French scholar, also supports the Derbyite theory in his Sous
le Masque de "William Shakespeare": William Stanley, VI Comte de Derby.
1920 - J. Thomas Looney, British schoolmaster and scholar, evolved the theory
of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford as author in his book, "Shakespeare"
Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.
1922 -
The Shakespeare Fellowship, an organization devoted to research on the Shakespearean
authorship, is formed with honorary president Sir George Greenwood, and officers
including J. T. Looney, Colonel B. R. Ward (father of the biographer of Edward
de Vere) and Abel Lefranc.
1926 -
Sigmund Freud adopts J. Thomas Looney's theory on the 17th Earl of Oxford. (One
of Freud's teachers, Theodor Meynert, had believed in Bacon as the true author.)
Freud later confirmed this advocacy in 1935 with the revision of his Autobiographical
Study.
1930 -
Canon Gerald Rendall, Gladstone professor of Greek at Liverpool's University
College, publishes Shakespeare Sonnets and Edward de Vere --another book that
influenced Sigmund Freud.
1930 -
Eva Turner Clark publishes a book, Shakespeare's Plays in the Order of Their
Writing, which proposes that the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote the plays and at
a much earlier date than supposed.
1943 -
Alden Brooks advocates the candidacy of Sir Edward Dyer as author in his book,
Will Shakspere and the Dyer's Hand.
1952 -
Dr. A. W. Titherley, onetime dean of the faculty of science at the University
of Liverpool wrote Shakespeare's Identity in which he tried to establish the
Derbyite theory through a series of scientific formulas.
1955 -
Calvin Hoffman in his book, The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare",
reawakened interest in the theory that Christopher Marlowe was author of Shakespeare's
plays.
1956 -
George Elliot Sweet's Shakespeare the Mystery presents the case for Queen Elizabeth
as author.
1957 - present
Incorporation of the Shakespeare Oxford Society. From its inception (originally
as the Shakespeare Fellowship in the l930s) a stream of publications in the
form of books, newsletters, and journals advanced the evidence for Edward de
Vere's authorship of the Shakespeare canon. Noted writers: Charlton and Dorothy
Ogburn, Charlton Ogburn, Jr., Charles Wisner Barrell, Louis Benezet, Gelett
Burgess, Ruth Loyd Miller, Dr. A. Bronson Feldman.
1962 -
Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in Realites ( Nov. 1962) says, "One-hundredth
part of the labor (expended on Shakespeare's curriculum vitae) applied to one
of his insignificant contemporaries would be sufficient to produce a substantial
biography."
1964 -
Justice Wilberforce in a court case in England brought by the heirs of the deceased
Evelyn May Hopkins, challenging the validity of her gift to the Francis Bacon
Society, Inc., gave an opinion in favor of Miss Hopkins' intentions, indicating
that "the evidence in favour of Shake-speare's authorship is quantitatively
slight. It rests positively, in the main, on the explicit statements in the
First Folio of 1623 and on continuous tradition; negatively on the lack of any
challenge to this ascription at the time." He goes on to say that the noted
English historian, Professor Trevor-Roper also considers that the case for William
Shakespeare rests on a narrow balance of evidence and that new material could
upset it"
1975
Reprint publication of Looney's Shakespeare Identified (edited by Ruth Loyd
Miller) from Minos Publishing.
1984
Publication of Charlton Ogburn's The Mysterious William Shakespeare results
in a burst of new interest in the authorship that continues today
1987
The Moot Court Debate in Washington DC presided over by three sitting Justices
of the US Supreme Court. Two of the three justices (Blackmun and Stevens), while
voting for Shaksper of Stratford on narrow legal grounds, express their great
interest in the issue and later express opinions that Edward de Vere may very
well be the true Shakespeare.
1989
Broadcast on PBS' Frontline of The Shakespeare Mystery further increases awareness
and interest in the authorship debate.
1994-
The new technology of the Internet provides electronic forums and electronic
publishing for the Shakespeare Oxford Society to reach increasing numbers of
people, especially students, around the world.
1995
A Shakespeare Oxford Society Home Page and a new electronic magazine (The Ever
Reader) are started on the World Wide Web, bringing the authorship resources
and news of the debate to a global audience. Teachers at both the high school
and college level increasingly have class assignments on the authorship debate
and use the Internet as a primary resource for up-to-date information.
1997
The Edward de Vere Studies Conference is founded by Dr. Daniel L. Wright (Head,
Department of English) at Concordia University (Portland, Oregon).
4. Now do the same for the doubts surrounding the Stratfordian attribution.
First in There is no reference during the lifetime of Shakepere of Stratford
(1564-1616) which either speaks of the author of the Shakespearean works as
having come from Stratford or speaks of the Stratford man as being an author.
(The first indication that the author of Shakespeare's plays came from Stratford
appears, ambiguously, in the prefatory materials of the 1623 First Folio.)
-In an age of copious eulogies, none was forthcoming when William Shakspere
died in Stratford. William Camden in his book Remaines had praised the author
"Shakespeare", but in his Annals for the year 1616 Camden omits mention
of the Stratford man's death. Also, in the list of Stratford Worthies of 1605
Camden omits the Stratford man's name, even though Camden had previously passed
on Shakspere's application for a family coat of arms. (The inference is that
it did not occur to Camden that the author, "Shakespeare", and the
Stratford man were the same person.) The first memorial verse to "Shakespeare"
appears in the 1623 Folio.
-There is no mention in the documents of the time of a Shakespeare's, or a Shakspere's,
intimate acquaintance with the inner court circles as has been implied by such
contemporaries as Ben Jonson, later seventeenth-century commentators such as
John Ward, the author's dedications to the Earl of Southampton of two poems,
and internal evidence from Shakespeare's works.
-The author of Shakespeare's works had to be familiar with a wide body of knowledge
for his time --on such subjects as law, music, foreign languages, the classics,
and aristocratic manners and sports. There is no documentation that William
Shakspere of Stratford had access to such information.
-Despite evidence of Shakspere's unspecified connection with the theater, documentation
of any career as an actor is conspicuously absent. For example, there is no
record of any part he may have played, and only two posthumous traditions to
bit parts. Contrary to all this, the 1623 Folio lists 'William Shakespeare"
at the head of "...the Principall Actors in all these Playes." Since
the hint that the author came from Stratford is also made here for the first
time, the dubiousness of the one claim should make us suspect the other as well.
-In the Stratford man's will, noteworthy for its detailed disposition of household
furniture, there is no mention of books, library, manuscripts, or of any literary
interest. Indeed, the only theatrical connection there appears as an interlined
bequest to three actors.
-The only specimens of William Shakspere's handwriting to come down to us are
six almost illegible signatures, each formed differently from the others, and
each from the latter period of his life (none earlier than 1612). Three of these
signatures are on his will, one is on a deposition in someone else's breach
of promise case, and two are on property documents. None of these has anything
to do with literature. The first syllable, incidentally, in all these signatures
is spelled "Shak", whereas the published plays and poems consistently
spell the name "Shake".
-There is no evidence that William Shakepere had left Stratford for London before
1585 (with the birth of his twins). This 1585 date is providing a great difficulty
as more commentators find earlier dates for the composition of certain plays
and poems.
5. Consider the logic/illogic of each position and evaluate the effectiveness of each argument.
6. Make a list of the six contenders for the authorship question. Then add
to each as much significant evidence that is presented.
DE VERE WROTE SHAKESPEARE
Use the Internet information linked below to answer these questions specifically
related to DEVERE WROTE SHAKESPEARE:
1. Many authorities have made claims that De Vere more than anyone is most closely related to being the author of the Shakespearean collection. Why? Because hamlet and Oxford have similar plots but the names of the people are different and a few things.
2. What are some of the coincidental connections between the Earl of Oxford and Shakespeare? Are these connections strong enough to support Oxfordian Claims? No because he died 12 years before Shakespeare, so he would not be able to of written Shakespeare’s playwrights
3. What problems exist between the authorship of the Shakespearean poems and
plays?
4. What similarities exist between DeVere's writing and Shakespeare's writing?
(consider style and structure) Shakespeare and De Vere’s sonnets are alike
in some ways but it is mainly not the same. They sometimes talk about similar
things.
5. What type of logic/illogic is used to support the Oxfordian claims? It is
impossible that De Vere wrote Shakespeare mainly because he died 12 year before
Shakespeare. De Vere wrote in a different form
1. What is the Shakespeare authorship problem? People believe that Shakespeare didn’t right all of his plays, and sonnets. This is a overgeneralization
2. What literary, cultural, and political figures doubt that Shakespeare was the sole author of the work? The people that thought that Shakespreare did not right his plays are, Delia Bacon, Mr. Justice Harry A. Blackmun, Charlie Chaplin, Samuel Clemens, Charles Dickens, Malcolm X, David McCullough, and many others.
3. Make a chronological history of the doubts that surround the authorship
of the Shakespearean canon.
1728 -
Publication of Captain Goulding's Essay Against Too Much Reading in which he
comments on the background Shakespeare would require for his historical plays
and suggests that Shakespeare probably had to keep "one of those chuckle-pated
Historians for his particular Associate...or he might have starvd upon his History."
Goulding tells us that he had this from "one of his (Shakespeare's) intimate
Acquaintance."
1769 -
Publication of The Life and Adventures of Common Sense, an anonymous allegory
which describes a profligate Shakespeare casting "his Eye upon a common
place Book, in which was contained, an Infinite Variety of Modes and Forms,
to express all the different Sentiments of the human Mind, together with Rules
for their Combinations and Connections upon every Subject or Occasion that might
Occur in Dramatic Writing..."
1785 -
Rev. James Wilmot, D.D. attributed authorship to Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam.
1786 -
The Story of the Learned Pig , an anonymous allegory by an "Officer of
the Royal Navy," in which The Pig describes himself as having variously
been a greyhound, deer, bear and a human being (after taking possession of a
body) who worked as horseholder at a playhouse where he met the "Immortal
Shakespeare" who's he reports didn't "run his country for deer-stealing"
and didn't father the various plays, Hamlet, Othello, As You Like It, The Tempest
, and Midsummer's Night Dream. Instead the Pig confesses to be author.
1848 -
In The Romance of Yachting by Joseph C. Hart, a former American consul at Santa
Cruz, provides Considerable anti-Stratfordian opinion. Favors Jonson as probable
author of Shakespeare's plays.
1852 -
August issue of Chambers' Edinburgh Journal contained an anonymous article,
'Who Wrote Shakespeare" The author suggests that Shakespeare "kept
a poet."
1856 -
Bacon is proposed as author of Shakespeare's plays in Putnam's Monthly (January
issue) which contained "Shakespeare and His Plays: An Inquiry Concerning
Them" by Delia Bacon, an American bearing no family relationship to Francis
Bacon.
1857 -
Publication of The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, a book by
Delia Bacon in which she considers the possibility of several authors. Nathanial
Hawthorne helped Delia Bacon publish this book, for which he contributed a preface.
1891/92 -
James Greenstreet, a British archivist, in a series of essays in The Genealogist,
proposed that William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby was author of the Shakespeare
plays.
1892 -
Our English Homer listed several writers as a group who were responsible for
writing Shakespeare's works: Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Nashe, Lodge, Bacon and
others.
1895 -
It Was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries, a novel by Wilbur
Ziegler, proposed that Marlowe, Raleigh, and the Earl of Rutland were authors
of the Shakespearean canon.
1903 -
Henry James in a letter to Miss Violet Hunt says "I am 'a sort of' haunted
by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful
fraud ever practised on a patient world."
1908 -
Sir George Greenwood, scholar and Member of Parliament, exposed the major arguments
and scholarship against the Stratford man as author of the Shakespearean canon
in his book, The Shakespeare Problem Restated, the first in a series of volumes
that Sir George devoted to the subject.
1910 -
Bacon Is Shakespeare by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence (New York, John McBride Co.)
cited arguments that Bacon is Shakespeare and that the following are distinguished
men who perceived "the truth respecting the real authorship of the Plays:"
--Lord Palmerston, British statesman, 1784-1865.
--Lord Houghton, British statesman, 1809-1885 (better known as Richard Monckton
Milnes).
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, British critic and poet, 1772-1834
--John Bright, British statesman, 1811-1889 ("Any man that believes that
William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote Hamlet or Lear is a fool.")
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, American philosopher and poet, 1803-1882
--John Greenlief Whittier, American poet, 1807-1892 ("Whether Bacon wrote
the wonderful plays or not, I am quite sure the man Shakspere neither did nor
could.")
--Dr. W. H. Furness, eminent American scholar and father of the editor of the
Variorum, 1802-1891 ("I am one of the many who have never been able to
bring the life of William Shakepeare and the plays of Shakespeare within planetary
space of each other.")
--Mark Twain, American author and humorist, 1835-1910
--Prince Otto von Bismarck, 1815-1898
1915 -
The Derbyite theory, suggesting that William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby was
the true author behind the Shakespeare name, was revived by Robert Fraser in
The Silent Shakespeare.
1919 -
Abel Lefranc, a French scholar, also supports the Derbyite theory in his Sous
le Masque de "William Shakespeare": William Stanley, VI Comte de Derby.
1920 - J. Thomas Looney, British schoolmaster and scholar, evolved the theory
of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford as author in his book, "Shakespeare"
Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford.
1922 -
The Shakespeare Fellowship, an organization devoted to research on the Shakespearean
authorship, is formed with honorary president Sir George Greenwood, and officers
including J. T. Looney, Colonel B. R. Ward (father of the biographer of Edward
de Vere) and Abel Lefranc.
1926 -
Sigmund Freud adopts J. Thomas Looney's theory on the 17th Earl of Oxford. (One
of Freud's teachers, Theodor Meynert, had believed in Bacon as the true author.)
Freud later confirmed this advocacy in 1935 with the revision of his Autobiographical
Study.
1930 -
Canon Gerald Rendall, Gladstone professor of Greek at Liverpool's University
College, publishes Shakespeare Sonnets and Edward de Vere --another book that
influenced Sigmund Freud.
1930 -
Eva Turner Clark publishes a book, Shakespeare's Plays in the Order of Their
Writing, which proposes that the 17th Earl of Oxford wrote the plays and at
a much earlier date than supposed.
1943 -
Alden Brooks advocates the candidacy of Sir Edward Dyer as author in his book,
Will Shakspere and the Dyer's Hand.
1952 -
Dr. A. W. Titherley, onetime dean of the faculty of science at the University
of Liverpool wrote Shakespeare's Identity in which he tried to establish the
Derbyite theory through a series of scientific formulas.
1955 -
Calvin Hoffman in his book, The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare",
reawakened interest in the theory that Christopher Marlowe was author of Shakespeare's
plays.
1956 -
George Elliot Sweet's Shakespeare the Mystery presents the case for Queen Elizabeth
as author.
1957 - present
Incorporation of the Shakespeare Oxford Society. From its inception (originally
as the Shakespeare Fellowship in the l930s) a stream of publications in the
form of books, newsletters, and journals advanced the evidence for Edward de
Vere's authorship of the Shakespeare canon. Noted writers: Charlton and Dorothy
Ogburn, Charlton Ogburn, Jr., Charles Wisner Barrell, Louis Benezet, Gelett
Burgess, Ruth Loyd Miller, Dr. A. Bronson Feldman.
1962 -
Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in Realites ( Nov. 1962) says, "One-hundredth
part of the labor (expended on Shakespeare's curriculum vitae) applied to one
of his insignificant contemporaries would be sufficient to produce a substantial
biography."
1964 -
Justice Wilberforce in a court case in England brought by the heirs of the deceased
Evelyn May Hopkins, challenging the validity of her gift to the Francis Bacon
Society, Inc., gave an opinion in favor of Miss Hopkins' intentions, indicating
that "the evidence in favour of Shake-speare's authorship is quantitatively
slight. It rests positively, in the main, on the explicit statements in the
First Folio of 1623 and on continuous tradition; negatively on the lack of any
challenge to this ascription at the time." He goes on to say that the noted
English historian, Professor Trevor-Roper also considers that the case for William
Shakespeare rests on a narrow balance of evidence and that new material could
upset it"
1975
Reprint publication of Looney's Shakespeare Identified (edited by Ruth Loyd
Miller) from Minos Publishing.
1984
Publication of Charlton Ogburn's The Mysterious William Shakespeare results
in a burst of new interest in the authorship that continues today
1987
The Moot Court Debate in Washington DC presided over by three sitting Justices
of the US Supreme Court. Two of the three justices (Blackmun and Stevens), while
voting for Shaksper of Stratford on narrow legal grounds, express their great
interest in the issue and later express opinions that Edward de Vere may very
well be the true Shakespeare.
1989
Broadcast on PBS' Frontline of The Shakespeare Mystery further increases awareness
and interest in the authorship debate.
1994-
The new technology of the Internet provides electronic forums and electronic
publishing for the Shakespeare Oxford Society to reach increasing numbers of
people, especially students, around the world.
1995
A Shakespeare Oxford Society Home Page and a new electronic magazine (The Ever
Reader) are started on the World Wide Web, bringing the authorship resources
and news of the debate to a global audience. Teachers at both the high school
and college level increasingly have class assignments on the authorship debate
and use the Internet as a primary resource for up-to-date information.
1997
The Edward de Vere Studies Conference is founded by Dr. Daniel L. Wright (Head,
Department of English) at Concordia University (Portland, Oregon).
4. Now do the same for the doubts surrounding the Stratfordian attribution.
First in There is no reference during the lifetime of Shakepere of Stratford
(1564-1616) which either speaks of the author of the Shakespearean works as
having come from Stratford or speaks of the Stratford man as being an author.
(The first indication that the author of Shakespeare's plays came from Stratford
appears, ambiguously, in the prefatory materials of the 1623 First Folio.)
-In an age of copious eulogies, none was forthcoming when William Shakspere
died in Stratford. William Camden in his book Remaines had praised the author
"Shakespeare", but in his Annals for the year 1616 Camden omits mention
of the Stratford man's death. Also, in the list of Stratford Worthies of 1605
Camden omits the Stratford man's name, even though Camden had previously passed
on Shakspere's application for a family coat of arms. (The inference is that
it did not occur to Camden that the author, "Shakespeare", and the
Stratford man were the same person.) The first memorial verse to "Shakespeare"
appears in the 1623 Folio.
-There is no mention in the documents of the time of a Shakespeare's, or a Shakspere's,
intimate acquaintance with the inner court circles as has been implied by such
contemporaries as Ben Jonson, later seventeenth-century commentators such as
John Ward, the author's dedications to the Earl of Southampton of two poems,
and internal evidence from Shakespeare's works.
-The author of Shakespeare's works had to be familiar with a wide body of knowledge
for his time --on such subjects as law, music, foreign languages, the classics,
and aristocratic manners and sports. There is no documentation that William
Shakspere of Stratford had access to such information.
-Despite evidence of Shakspere's unspecified connection with the theater, documentation
of any career as an actor is conspicuously absent. For example, there is no
record of any part he may have played, and only two posthumous traditions to
bit parts. Contrary to all this, the 1623 Folio lists 'William Shakespeare"
at the head of "...the Principall Actors in all these Playes." Since
the hint that the author came from Stratford is also made here for the first
time, the dubiousness of the one claim should make us suspect the other as well.
-In the Stratford man's will, noteworthy for its detailed disposition of household
furniture, there is no mention of books, library, manuscripts, or of any literary
interest. Indeed, the only theatrical connection there appears as an interlined
bequest to three actors.
-The only specimens of William Shakspere's handwriting to come down to us are
six almost illegible signatures, each formed differently from the others, and
each from the latter period of his life (none earlier than 1612). Three of these
signatures are on his will, one is on a deposition in someone else's breach
of promise case, and two are on property documents. None of these has anything
to do with literature. The first syllable, incidentally, in all these signatures
is spelled "Shak", whereas the published plays and poems consistently
spell the name "Shake".
-There is no evidence that William Shakepere had left Stratford for London before
1585 (with the birth of his twins). This 1585 date is providing a great difficulty
as more commentators find earlier dates for the composition of certain plays
and poems.
5. Consider the logic/illogic of each position and evaluate the effectiveness of each argument.
6. Make a list of the six contenders for the authorship question. Then add
to each as much significant evidence that is presented.