> This channel is devoted to contemporary evidence showing that 'William Shakespeare' was the pseudonym of the poet and playwright, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), that he was buried at the exact spot where the monument to Shakespeare was installed in 1740 at Westminster Abbey, and that he was embroiled in a scandal involving Lady Penelope Rich and Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton.
People are still doing the anti-Stratfordian schtick?
I kinda love how the tone/framing of this person's channel is almost indistinguishable from other YouTube conspiracy theorists... it's just about Shakespeare's authorship and not ancient aliens or whatever.
I remember in school finding someone’s website where he’d carefully analysed every sonnet to show how Shakespeare was having an affair with the queen. I’m sure you’d never guess what all those love sonnets were really about…
You get a bunch of these crackpot theories in mathematics — well known universities would regularly get letters about squaring the circle, proving formats last theorem, etc. I wonder if the rate has decreased now that it is easier to access good information online, e.g. maybe a lot of people attempting to square the circle misunderstood what it meant when it was said that it couldn’t be done. And you get them in physics too (theories based on the weird analogies you get in popular magazines, or reading the wrong things into the ‘artists conceptions’ that accompany the articles). It’s surely not surprising that history gets its own crackpots, especially as so much more is debatable there.
I think that this controversy endures because there are mysteries and unanswered questions about Shakespeare's life.
While I'm willing to entertain the Oxfordian theories, they too have many holes and flaws.
Which still leaves us with a mystery. The answer is probably in the mundane, as Shakespeare probably simply retired to a quiet life and no-one back in Stratford valued him or his work. But it does seem odd to us now, when we regard him as one of the greatest writers in the English language.
There's no real mystery. Shakespeare was a well-regarded poet, actor, and playwright in a time in English history where these were not yet particularly prestigious things to be. Marlowe died a quarter-century before Shakespeare and we have virtually no documentary evidence from his lifetime, and yet nobody is making websites to prove that _Tamburlaine_ was really written by Ben Jonson.
The book Contested Will by James Shapiro is a really interesting historical review of why Shakespeare authorship theories are such a persistent and recurring thing, despite the lack of new evidence. He also covers how they got started in the first place and why it's Shakespeare in particular that gets this treatment. Highly recommended.
There is nothing mysterious about any of that. It is just a list of arguments used by the conspiracy theorists, and they are all easily debunked.
Just take the argument that because Shakespeares mother possibly was illiteral (which we don’t know, but it is plausible) he couldn’t have written about women sending letters. So a guy could write about ancient Rome, Cleopatra , ghosts, and faeries, but couldnt possibly have written about women sending letters if it didnt happen in his childhood home? This is so stupid I’m at a loss for words.
Or how could he use the word “tennis balls” in Henry V when his childhood home didnt have a tennis court? So mysterious!
