Some time ago, I put up a post about Professor Graham Holderness, a Shakespearean scholar who, at a seminar, made a comment that seemed to imply that the Earl of Oxford's biography is reflected in Shakespeare's plays. Oxfordians like myself made much of this. But today I received an email from Prof. Holderness, which I…

Longtime readers know that among my numerous other eccentricities, I think Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, is the true author of the plays and poems attributed to "William Shakespeare." The overwhelming majority of Shakespeare scholars reject this idea, though I have not been very impressed with their arguments. Now comes word that…

Because my last post glanced at the Shakespeare authorship controversy, I thought it might be interesting to lay out the kind of argument that Oxfordians — those who believe the works of Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford — rely on when making their case. Most of these arguments…

The blog "Shakespeare" By Another Name recently pointed me to an amusing online free-for-all in which a columnist for the London Times, Oliver Kamm, mixes it up with various anti-Stratfordians (i.e., people who doubt that the works of Shakespeare were written by the man from Stratford). This issue is not as interesting to me as…

Just in time for the birthday of William Shakespeare of Stratford (on April 23) comes an enjoyable Wall Street Journal article on the Shakespeare authorship controversy. The Journal article focuses on the Shakespeare debate as it affects the Supreme Court. Apparently our most powerful jurists have been squabbling over this issue for some time. I'm in…

As a break from quarrels about consciousness, religion, and other weighty topics, here's a post that originally appeared on this site on January 29, 2006. I've updated some of the links and made a few minor changes in the wording. For my other posts on the Shakespeare authorship controversy, click here. —- A fascinating article appears…

In the wake of Charlton Heston’s death, the Weekly Standard republished a letter written by the actor to that publication some years ago championing the Stratfordian cause. Among other things, Heston criticizes the view that "the queen and Oxford’s family would have been ‘scandalized’ … to know he’d written works of genius." He asks, Why?…

Those of us who doubt that "the Stratford man" wrote the works of Shakespeare, and who prefer the candidacy of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, are frequently confronted with the objection that some of Shakespeare’s plays postdate de Vere’s death in 1604. The two plays most commonly cited in this respect are…

Mark Anderson’s blog makes note of six new scholarly articles apparently establishling that Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, long thought to have been written after 1604, was actually based on sources that considerably predate that year. As Mark says, this is important to the authorship controversy, because the leading candidate for the "real Shakespeare," Edward de…

In 2001 Diana Price published an outstanding work of scholarship titled Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of an Authorship Problem, in which she reviewed all the extant documentary evidence for the life of William Shakespeare and concluded that there was nothing from the Stratford man’s lifetime to tie him to any literary works. There were,…