Who wrote Shakespeare's plays?

Question

One of the premises of a new film, "Anonymous", due to come out in a couple of weeks, is that Shakespeare's plays were authored by Edward de Vere, instead of by Shakespeare. The producers have also created educational materials arguing that Shakespeare was a fraud.

The notion that de Vere was the author has been around a while, having first been proposed in 1920 by a schoolmaster named J. Thomas Looney.

But what's the evidence? Is there a consensus among historians who've looked into the topic? Were Shakespeare's plays written by Shakespeare, de Vere, or someone else?

Answer 1

Shakespeare wrote the plays and the arguments that he didn't are mostly based on very implausible assumptions.

I hope I'm not misrepresenting any of the arguments against Shakespeare authorship, but it seems to me they all rely on just a handful of key assumptions. First, that the the plays and sonnets are about the author's life, and not primarily imagined. Second, that they are therefore coded references to the identity and experience of the author. And, third, that Shakespeare didn't have the relevant experience to write the content because he could not have had the necessary range of experiences.

I don't know how easy it is to definitively prove any point one way or the other, but it seems to be a big stretch to assume that an author cannot write fiction from their imagination rather than their life. Moreover it is a very modern assumption that everything is autobiography. According to James Shapiro's review of the evidence (In Contested Will) nobody at all made this sort of assumption about Shakespeare until 1780 at the earliest. And it was decades more before anyone used the assumption to build a case for a different author.

It makes no sense in general to assume that all fiction is really about the author or their experience. Did Thomas Harris have to experience cannibalism or psychopathology to write about Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs? Or did he do some research and imagine the character? How can we judge so long after his life that the author was writing from experience and not the imagination? And if we don't establish that he did, the other assumptions fall down. If the works emerge from the imagination, perhaps based on research, we can't use them to challenge authorship on the grounds the author didn't have the relevant experience. Even the literary evidence backs this up. As Shapiro summarises:

The evidence strongly suggests that imaginative literature in general and plays in particular in Shakespeare's day were rarely if ever a vehicle for self-revelation.

And there is concrete evidence in favour of Shakespeare as the author. Shapiro estimates that there were nearly enough extant copies of Shakespeare's works in London for every household to have one. He was extremely well known. Other writers talked about him and knew him well. No hint of alternative authorship appears in their writings. The plays were written to be performed not published and show many hints of an author intimately familiar with stagecraft (some versions offer stage directions with actors names instead of the characters they play, the sort of slip not likely to be made by a distant author but not unexpected of a fellow actor or director). Many other writers knew Shakespeare (and record their opinions of him) and some collaborated with him. It would require a monumental conspiracy to make sure no hints of another author appeared in these comments (all his collaborators and performers would have needed to be in on the conspiracy for a start).

In summary, unless we are prepared to make a leap of faith that the plays provide clues to the author's experience rather than his imagination, we have no basis to even start to question Shakespeare as the author. None of the other evidence in the plays even makes sense if we can't establish this assumption (and it's hard enough to judge even for authors still living).

Answer 2

This question has been the subject of a debate for (literally) centuries. Yes, as you mentioned from the film "Anonymous", Edward de Vere was one possible candidate.

Let's start with de Vere. He was the 17th Earl of Oxford. The bulk of evidence seems to be circumstantial, though plausible. Shakespeare was not a nobleman, so he was able to write sharp-witted parody without fear of repercussion e.g. getting exiled or executed for treason against HM Queen Elizabeth I. De Vere was certainly educated and well-versed in music, law, aristocratic sports and classic as well as contemporary Italian culture, which is a big part of Shakespeare's plays. Oxford wrote poetry and prose under his own name, and it was considered very good. If he wrote the plays, they could be interpreted as political satires of Court life and critiques of government. Final facts, which are suggestive but not conclusive.

• Oxford died in 1604, and the last play was written shortly before that
  EDIT
  This is questionable as a supporting claim for Oxford, as there is much evidence that The Tempest was written approx 1610-1611
• In 1623, Oxford's surviving family funded the first Shakespeare folio.

In 1920, the book Shakespeare Identified was published. It is the first modern reference to the Oxford theory of authorship.

The other candidate for authorship that I am most familiar with is Christopher Marlowe. Here is a rather focused website devoted exclusively to this subject, The Shakespeare Authorship Trust. Their list of possibilities include both de Vere and Marlowe, as well as Francis Bacon, Roger Manners, Henry Neville, Mary Sidney Herbert, William Stanley, William Shakespeare himself, or even a group theory of authorship, of one or more of that list.

The Shakespeare-Oxford Society (founded in 1957) also lists most of these individuals, as well as a timeline for why and when each was proposed as "the True Bard" and who believed it. For example, Sigmund Freud believed that de Vere was the real author, and came to that conclusion in 1926. Note that the Shakespeare-Oxford Society is

dedicated to... researching evidence that Edward de Vere (1550 – 1604) is the true author of the poems and plays of “William Shakespeare.”

Answer 3

There is no consensus, for example the author of this article claims that Shakespeare wrote the plays:

"The author of Willaim [sic] Shakespeare's plays was William Shakespeare."

Also several persons have been suggested as an author of one or more plays.

"And so, almost every prominent Elizabethan has been suggested at one time or another as the author of one or more of Shakespeare's plays: Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Derby, the Earl of Rutland, the Earl of Southampton, the Earl of Essex, Sir Walter Raleigh and of course, Francis Bacon."

Answer 4

Based on the preponderance of the evidence, neutrally evaluated, there is no conclusion that can be supported other than that the plays of Shakespeare were written by Christopher Marlowe.

Evidence

The best way to obtain evidence about this is stylometry. The stylometric evidence has been compiled by Farey, and it is found here: http://www.rey.prestel.co.uk . This evidence extends Mendenhall's idea, of using word-length distributions to distinguish authors. Farey used stylometries which were specifically chosen to distinguish Shakespeare from Marlowe (this is one of the most difficult tasks for a stylometry, for reasons that I think are obvious). He shows that in each case where a distinguishing feature is found, Shakespeare's work, if plotted in time, shows a trend, and that Marlowe's work fits this trend. It also conclusively shows that in the overlap region, of 1593 and the years around there, Shakespeare and Marlow are indistinguishable.

There are two plots here: http://www.rey.prestel.co.uk/appx6a.htm

and two more in this wonderful Hoffman prize winning essay: http://www.rey.prestel.co.uk/hoffman.htm

Answer 5

From a historical or literary perspective, this is a fairly unsolvable problem that has been discussed (as others have mentioned) for quite a while. Unless someone uncovers a genuine letter saying "I am not the author of these plays!" I am afraid that people might make arguments, but do so without solid proof. It is commonly known that we know extremely little about Shakespeare's life as a whole, so we are going to know less about this.

From time to time, "anti-stratfordians" have put forth various possible "real" Shakespeares, namely: Bacon, Marlowe, and de Vere (the more popular choice now). There was even a claim that a pig wrote Midsummer Night's Dream! You can get an overview at wikipedia or James Shapiro's Contested Will. (Here's a review). Any evidence is circumstantial, which means it will be able to be argued over without concrete evidence.

The scientific-seeming approach by "stylometry," is far from exact. Computational Linguistics is a new and evolving field, so measures to determine authorship can differ greatly depending on who is conducting the search. Here is an article that conducts a stlylometric analysis of Shakespeare and Marlowe, discussing the methodology in detail (they conclude they were not the same person).

Proving, for example, that two authors use keywords with similar frequency, as the above answer references, proves little more than coincidence. For example, it leaves out whether Shakespeare also wrote like Middleton or Dekker, whether Shakespeare and Marlowe use the keywords in similar combinations, the frequency of metrical structures, etc. Here is an in-depth discussion of linguistic analysis and style, as well as the problems of applying it to this particular debate.

Among academics, there is a community of scholars who challenge the authorship of Shakespeare, but the status quo is solidly that he wrote the plays and sonnets.