Do you believe in the "Shakespeare authorship question"?

i want to hear arguments for and against that particular conspiracy theory, i welcome the debate

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You can't prove William Shakespeare wasn't a pseudonym

I just don't care much. The entity known as Shakespeare was the greatest author of all time. Hard to care if it was really Marlowe, or Ben Johnson, or Francis Bacon, or the black woman in that troll photo. They're all long dead, credit doesn't matter anymore.

No because

1) there's enough evidence that he was who he said he was
2) even if it's all a conspiracy it doesn't matter at all because the works are what matter and we can identify them all as "Shakespeare" anyway, just as we identify Socrates as a real person and not a persona wholly created by Plato
3) I'm not a dumb faggot

With that being said, the coincidences of Hamlet with De Vere's life are too great to be ignored

List the evidence mate

he probably found some of euripideses old plays in a jar somewhere

Yes, William wrote the plays.

1. Ben Jonson would have blasted the thing open if he did not since he was the shit-stirrer of his time.

2. There are lots of Warwickshire (born and grew up there) jargon throughout the plays.

my new pod on hamlet
soundcloud.com/heyokapod/hamlet

Whoever he was, he knew something about the pyramids

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I'm convinced that its Oxford, De Vere or Bacon, Bacon because of the hermetics, the other two circumstantial evidence. Someone who was not connected with the highest levels of european nobility and did not travel extensively would not have access to the lexicon necessary to create that body of work. I also seriously wonder if he wrote every part of the corpus, though it seems no one doubts this
Shakespeare is hermetic, all great Renaissance art is Hermetic
this but unironically

What book is this from

Im a retard and never read his work, but I really like it

no, stop being retarded

kespeare's Sonnets

>Someone who was not connected with the highest levels of european nobility and did not travel extensively would not have access to the lexicon necessary to create that body of work

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I think he's just a normal guy from Stratford-Upon-Avon who happened to be a genius. Chesterton talks a little about this, the idea that some people can't comprehend how somebody could be so ordinary, and come from such humble beginnings, and still be so brilliant, so they're compelled to invent fictions and conspiracies.

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This. "Shakespeare" may as well have been the person that wrote the plays/sonnets.

Bacon wrote the best of, if not all of Shakespeare’s work. Historical Shakespeare didn’t have any books to hand down to his children, the writer had a basic knowledge of many languages and his philosophical references, and the know-how to employ them as brilliantly as he did, must require that the writer had a bunch of books. I think it must be clear to anyone that has really studied Shakespeare that he was a philosopher first, poet second, playwrite third (if not politician before playwrite). Read King James Version of the Bible, realize Bacon was good buddy of king James, read Bacon, re-read Shakespeare, the way in which words are put together alone should convince you that Bacon had a hand in all of this greatness. Fucking read Bacon (not said in an angry tone, but one that expresses amazement at Bacon’s brilliance). Just do it, no matter your opinion on the Shakespeare mess. He is fantastic

Ben Jonson knew Bacon
Even wrote him a tribute
Yet Jonson attributes Shakespeare's work to Shakespeare, and not Bacon
Now why would he do that?

amazon.com/Shakespeares-Imagery-What-Tells-Us/dp/0521092582
there's no metaphoric resemblance. even ignoring the glut of evidence -- and what a mountain one must subvert to believe this baconian (or oxfordian, or...) nonsense -- their imaginations, ie, personalities, are tonally and conceptually sui generis.
OP Bloom is a meme but he's right when he says the anti-stratfordian memetheories are theories of anxiety foremost.

aye, theres the rub

This. Shakespeare made the use of every available educational resource. He saw plays constantly and remembered not only the conventions of writing them, but also their themes and plots and subject matter. He was pretty well versed at history and probably read books in his spare time, but was never able to see a map and wrote about "the coasts of Bohemia"

agree with this one

Don’t forget that he would also out avacodo seeds up his anus and then cover one of his nostrils with his in dex finger while simultanously blowing a booger out of the other nostril and the seed out of his ass. It was a party trick that won him recognition in court and sllowed him to write his plays.

For the same reason Bacon would attribute them to Shakepeare. Use your head, not some other fuck’s. If Ben knew Bacon well enough, he would have understood his reasoning. If he didn’t know him well enough, we can’t trust his opinion anyway. Anyone coming at it from an English perspective will agree with Bloom and establishment that some uneducated cunt wrote Hamlet and the Tempest to be performed by second-class citizens for second-class citizens, on a stage. English scholarship is the biggest joke of a science.

it is meth nite

That’s completely wrong either that Caroline Spurgeon did read Bacon or you didn’t read her well, but imagery and metaphorical similarities abound between Bacon and the spearemeister

it was obviously a black woman you dumb nazis

Ha nise

possibly an underground negro hive

Assuming Ben Jonson did not know Bacon well--which he didn't, really, by all evidence--why was Jonson under the impression that Shakespeare, a rival and personal friend, was the author of the plays and sonnets, and not Bacon?

like what? what are the similarities?

because his name was "Bacon"

Anyone have the pynchon post about this

it's on libgen; i encourage you to read the relevant chapter.

I'm sorry, I don't follow. Why would Jonson have any interest in concealing Bacon's authorship?

Sorry that was someone else. But because Bacon didn’t want people to know. If you were Johnson and you found out that some aristocrat was putting out the finest literature known to man under the pen name of a poor barely educated schmuck, I think you would see the value in protecting that secret. Bacon knew what plato knew and Ammonius knew, and Plotinus knew, and Pythagoras knew about fame around one’s name. Like Achilles said, he’d’ve rather been a serf in the fields. Tell me to go back to x, I’m cool with it.

Do you really think someone wouldn’t want to put their name on Hamlet?

Ya, I just added it to my wishlist. I love the subject matter, but I’ve read English academics write on the subject when I had access to my university library and it really was pathetic. They were like orthodox catholic apologists trying to account for the 4 different resurrection stories by meshing them into one. But our evidence, or lack thereof, of Shakespeare’s authorship is more recent and more absent. Look to platonic writers for the link between Bacon and Shakespeare’s philosophy. It really is incredible how frequently Shakespeare’s name comes up in platonic secondary literature. I’ll try to come back and be more thorough with sourced instances of similarity tomorrow. It’s late, y’know?

But Jonson and Shakespeare were friends and rivals. There are humorous and also cutting allusions to each other in their respective works. Jonson even denigrated Shakespeare for the lack of formal learning evident in his work. How does Bacon fit into that dynamic?

Is this the best sonnet? I like 130 but reading this one again, it is fucking glorious and I can’t think of a competitor.

I don’t think the author of Shakespeare’s better works would have sunk to the level of trash talking a shit writer.

>I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by wherein he most faulted. And to justify mine own candor, for I loved the man, and do honor his memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any; he was (indeed) honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped: Sufflimandus erat, as Augustus said of Haterius.[1] His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too. Many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter: as when he said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, “Caesar, thou dost me wrong,” he replied “Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause,” and such like, which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.

For, if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe’s mighty line.[3]
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honor thee I would not seek
For names, but call forth thund’ring Aeschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,[4]
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread,
And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

>And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek

you don't think much at all, i think

I just don't understand why people find it so hard to believe that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. So what if he had humble beginnings? So did Mozart, but nobody disputes that he wrote the music he did.

Provide one example of ‘shakespeare’ shooting shit at Jonson. That is the easier and more effective way to prove your point. I can’t provide any and I don’t think it was done, so I’m at a loss you see

Humble beginnings and humble endings. Access to information was nothing like it is now and anyone that argues that the author of Shakespeare’s work, someone that must have had access to thousands of books (really narrows it down to less than fifty people in the city) was anyone but tip-top aristocracy is a fucking idiot.

the characters of ajax in troilus and cressida as well as jacques in as you like it are believed to be caricatures of both jonson and his work
none of the material in the plays requires anything beyond a grammar school education, which we know shakespeare had

>we can identify them all as "Shakespeare" anyway, just as we identify Socrates as a real person and not a persona wholly created by Plato
How is that the same thing? Nobody thinks the Socratic dialogues record Socrates' actual words.

Shakespeare wrote his own works. FACT.

linguistic analyses proved that "Shakespeare" was one person so no

>all great Renaissance art is Hermetic
Renaissance architecture and painting is less hermetic than it was in the middle ages.

warosu.org/lit/thread/S667543#p667573

it's silly. the thought that the publishers of the folios and the artists who illustrated and illuminated them were necessarily in on the plot and never until the time of their death, let such a monumental secret escape their lips. it would seem safest at present to keep our feet solidly on the stratford ground and not fly off into a speculative space.

the mystery of the plays - the almost unbelievable quantity of heaven-sent beauty would be less understandable from bacon or any busy man of affairs than from shakespeare, who very evidently buried himself in his work.

>His wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had been so too. Many times he fell into those things could not escape laughter: as when he said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, “Caesar, thou dost me wrong,” he replied “Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause,” and such like, which were ridiculous.
mfw when Shakespeare invented Marvel quips

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>none of the material in the plays requires anything beyond a grammar school education, which we know shakespeare had
Could this explain why he made up so many new words? I'm not sure if this was a common practice in Elizabethan literature, but I would think if you didn't have the means to express yourself with erudite references, you would have to make your own means to communicate your idea.

Why didn't he know Latin or Greek then like all the educated writers of his time?

He was an anthologist. He took a bunch of popular stories, of which there were many versions, and his versions are the only ones that were remembered.

He did, not as much as the scholarly Jonson, but a decent package that you or I would gladly trade for our algebra or geometry.

And he put into the little melodramas some of the greatest living stuff man has ever made

Personally I haven't seen a strong enough case to completely disregard Bacon; who is the strongest contender, to my mind.

I often see a lot of outrage that we're even having this discussion in the first place, but never any irrefutable counters.

From what I've heard of the Baconian's story, it's one of the few laughs in Shakespeare commentary.

Bacon's life we know better probably in its daily details than that of any other Elizabethan. His almost continual intrigues, both before he became High Chancellor and after his expulsion from office in disgrace, are known in every detail. The time element alone precludes his having added the thirty-seven plays to his other known and admittedly exalted writings. And this "the meanest of mankind," as Macaulay has called him; this "sycophant and flatterer, bent on self-exaltation, climbing to power by base subserviency; resorting to all the arts of the courtier to win the favor of his sovereign," was surely not the man to hide his light under a bushel. No, that thought is possibly the hardest Baconian pill to swallow.

Not to mention

Ty

Just read the Borges essay on it, he compares the psychologies of Marlowe and Bacon in the way they write compared to Shakespeare and makes it pretty obvious it wasn't them. Not a masterly essay but it was a crackpot theory anyway so doesnt take much to dismantle.

Wasn't Bacon fluent in at least French and Latin? As I recall Shakespeare ripped off passages from contemporary English-language translations of French and Latin authors (for example, there are bits in The Tempest taken from a translation of Montaigne), while if it was actually Bacon he would have probably translated it himself.

wasnt there some book or article that showed borderline plagiarism by Bill? It was fairly recent.

Read Schoenbaum's Shakespeare's Lives, Shakespeare: A Documentary Life, and William Shakespeare: Records and Images. More than enough documentary evidence, none for the anti-Stratfordian candidates.

Anti stratfordians are the literary equivalent of flat earthers

English professor had to bring this up once a class for the entire term, like that somehow makes Shakespeare more legit or something.

>the idea that some people can't comprehend how somebody could be so ordinary, and come from such humble beginnings, and still be so brilliant
shakespeare is a mystery. and when ordinary intellects peer into the mighty depths of a mind like his, it is apt to make us a little giddy-headed.

>I remember, the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out line.
literally not true... we have revised folio editions of lear at the least

>must have had access to thousands of books
or, you know, he went to the theater and sought out oral histories...

shakespeare is eight black wimmen and a gay chinese guy, because they are murka's current minority.

>there are bits in The Tempest taken from a translation of Montaigne
shakespeare was known to possess golding's metamorphoses and Florio's essais

I like the idea of thinking it's Marlowe but it's all speculation really, the works transcend the authorship really with all the uncertently, there is certainly nothing that will falsify Shakespeare.

It's just an interesting thing to read about, plenty of of authors such mark twain theorized that it wasn't someone other than Shakespeare.

I hate to inject a second conspiracy into this conspiracy thread, but this is absolutely Thomas Pynchon. It mimics in style, tone, and structure his preface to Slow Learner. It is also erratically brilliant in the signature Pynchon sense. I find this very exciting, and have printed copies for posterity.

Especially this bit, you can tell by the sentence structure:

>Sir William Empson, who was a very well-read and intelligent man, and a good poet, so I won't knock him for being a critic, at the end of his life declared that he had read Marvell's satirical poems "Advice to a Painter" and decided that it was clearly the work of 6 different people. Most professional Marvell scholars thought Empson was just off his trolley (as they say in the UK), and he probably was.