Authorship Theory Essay Example For Students

Authorship Theory Essay For a host of persuasive but commonly disregarded reasons, the Earl of Oxford has quietly become by far the most compelling man to be found behind the mask of Shake-speare. As Orson Welles put it in 1954, I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you dont agree, there are some awful funny coincidences incidences to explain away. Some of these coincidences are obscure, others are hard to overlook. A 1578 Latin encomium to Oxford, for example, contains some highly suggestive praise: Pallas lies concealed in thy right hand, it says. Thine eyes flash fire; Thy countenance shakes spears. Elizabethans knew that Pallas Athena was known by the sobriquet the spear-shaker. The hyphen in Shake-speares name also was a tip-off: other Elizabethan pseudonyms include Cutbert Curry-knave, Simon Smell-knave, and Adam Fouleweather student in asse-tronomy. FN*. The case for Oxfords authorship hardly rests on hidden clues and allusions, however. One of the most important new pieces of Oxfordian evidence centers around a 1570 English Bible, in the Geneva translation, once owned and annotated by the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. In an eight-year study of the de Vere Bible, a University of Massachusetts doctoral student named Roger Stritmatter has found that the 430-year-old book is essentially, as he puts it, Shake-speares Bible with the Earl of Oxfords coat of arms on the cover. Stritmatter discovered that more than a quarter of the 1,066 annotations and marked passages in the de Vere Bible appear in Shake-speare. The parallels range from the thematicsharing a motif, idea, or tropeto the verbalusing names, phrases, or wordings that suggest a specific biblical passage. In his research, Stritmatter pioneered a stylistic-fingerprinting technique that involves isolating an authors most prominent biblical allusionsthose that appear four or more times in the authors canon. After compiling a list of such diagnostic verses for the writings of Shake-speare and three of his most celebrated literary contemporariesFrancis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edmund SpenserStritmatter undertook a comparative study to discern how meaningful the de Vere Bible evidence was. He found that each authors favorite biblical allusions composed a unique and idiosyncratic set and could thus be marshaled to distinguish one author from another. Stritmatter then compared each set of diagnostics to the marked passages in the de Vere Bible. The results were, from any perspective but the most dogmatically orthodox, a stunning confirmation of the Oxfordian theory. Stritmatter found that very few of the marked verses in the de Vere Bible appeared in Spensers, Marlowes, or Bacons diagnostic verses. On the other hand, the Shake-speare canon brims with de Vere Bible verses. Twenty-nine of Shake-speares top sixty-six biblical allusions are marked in the de Vere Bible. Furthermore, three of Shake-speares diagnostic verses show up in Oxfords extant letters. All in all, the correlation between Shake-speares favorite biblical verses and Edward de Veres Bible is very high: . 439 compared with . 054, . 068, and . 020 for Spenser, Marlowe, and Bacon. Was Shake-speare the pen name for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or must we formulate ever more elaborate hypotheses that preserve the old byline but ignore the appeal of common sense and new evidence? One favorite rejoinder to the Oxfordian argument is that the authors identity doesnt really matter; only the works do. The plays the thing has become the shibboleth of indifference-claiming doubters. These four words, however, typify Shake-speares attitude toward the theater about as well as the first six words of A Tale of Two Cities express Charles Dickenss opinion of the French Revolution: It was the best of times. In both cases, the fragment suggests an authorial perspective very different from the original context. The plays the thing, Hamlet says, referring to his masque The Mouse-trap, wherein Ill catch the conscience of the king. Hardly a prÃÆ'Â ©cis for advocating the death of the author, Hamlets observation reports that dramas function comes closer to espionage than to mere entertainment. Hamlets full quote is, in fact, a fair summary of the Oxfordian reading of the entire cannon. If pressed, Shake-speare, like Hamlet, would probably deny a plays topical relevance. But, as an ambitious courtier, he would have valued his dramaturgical ability to comment on, lampoon, vilify, and praise people and events at Queen Elizabeths court. It is hard to deny that Hamlet is the closest Shake-speare comes to a picture of the dramatist at work. Nowadays, assertions that one can recover the authors perspective from his own dramatic self-portraits are often ridiculed as naive or simplistic. Yet the conversethat Shake-speare somehow evaded the realities and particulars of his own life in creating his most enduring, profound, and nuanced charactersis absurd on its face. Themes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight EssayHis first marriage to Anne Cecil left him a widower, like Lear, with three daughters, of whom the elder two were married. His second marriage produced only one son, whose patrilineal claims could conceivably be challenged by Oxfords bastard sona mirror of the gullible Earl of Gloucesters situation. As if highlighting one of the thematic underpinnings of King Lear, in his Bible, Oxford marked Hosea 9:7 The prophet is a fool; the spiritual man is mad, which Lears daughter Goneril inverts in her venomous remark that Jesters do oft prove prophets.. Prospero. The Tempests exiled nobleman, cast-away hermit, and scholarly shaman provides the authors grand farewell to a world that he recognizes will bury his name, even when his book is exalted to the ends of the earth. Oxfordians, in general, agree with scholarly tradition that The Tempest was probably Shake-speares final playand many concur with the German Stratfordian critic Karl Elze that all external arguments and indications are in favor of the play being written in the year 1604. Before he takes his final bow, Prospero makes one last plea to his eternal audience. Drawing from a contiguous set of Oxfords marked verses at Ecclesiasticus 28:1-5 concerning the need for reciprocal mercy as the precondition of human freedom, Prospero delivers his farewell speech with the hopes that someone will take him at his word:. R elease me from my bands With the help of your good hands! Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill or else my project fails, Which was to please. Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant, And my ending is despair, Unless I be relievd by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardond be, Let your indulgence set me free. Like Hamlet, The Tempests aristocrat cum magus begs those around him to hear his story and, in so doing, to free him from his temporary chains. The rest, as the academic ghost-chase for the cipher from Stratford has ably demonstrated, is silence. At the end of The Tempest, Prospero uses the metaphors of shipwrecks and stormy weather to deliver his closing salvo against the desolate island he called home. During the final year of his life, the Earl of Oxford clearly had such imagery on his mind, as can be seen in his eloquent April 1603 letter to his former brother-in-law, Robert Cecil, on the death of Queen Elizabeth: In this common shipwreck, mine is above all the rest, who least regarded, though often comforted, of all her followers, she hath left to try my fortune among the alterations of time and chance, either without sail whereby to take the advantage of any prosperous gale, or with anchor to ride till the storm be overpast. The alterations of time and chance have been cruel to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. But the last five years of discoveries and developments have made two things increasingly clear: the tempest has broken, and Prosperos indulgence is finally upon us. Added material. FOOTNOTE* Another intriguing reference comes from the satirist Thomas Nashe, who included a dedication to a Gentle Master William in his 1593 book Strange News, describing him as the most copious poet in England. He alludes to the blue boar, Oxfords heraldic emblem, and roasts William with the Latin phrase Apis lapis, which translates as sacred ox.. 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. The more I turn him round and round the more he so affects me. But that is allI am not pretending to treat the question or to carry it any further. It bristles with difficulties, and I can only express my general sense by saying that I find it almost as impossible to conceive that Bacon wrote the plays as to conceive that the man from Stratford, as we know the man from Stratford, did.