Until 1856, when Delia Bacon published “William Shakespeare and his Plays: An Enquiry Concerning Them” in Putnam’s Magazine, no one questioned that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon had written the plays ascribed to him in the First Folio of his works (1623), and possibly, in part or whole, a few others not included there. One may well wonder why anyone ever bothered to doubt it; James Shapiro, in his excellent Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010), concludes that the sceptics harbor post-Romantic theories about the necessarily autobiographical nature of imaginative writing—according to which “the Stratford man” could not possibly have known first-hand all the things contained in the plays (but who could?)—combined with formidable snobbery about Shakespeare’s bourgeois origins, alleged lack of education, and patchily documented life. Over time, the voices of dissent have swelled into a cacophony, forcing a response from scholars who had habitually dismissed the matter as not worth serious discussion. Recently the arguments have been given new prominence both by the “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt,” an online statement, launched in 2007 by the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition (SAC), urging that rival claims be taken seriously and studied at universities, and by the film Anonymous (2011), which depicts the Earl of Oxford as the true author of the plays. So far, the academic world has largely neglected the matter, although there is now a Master’s course in Shakespeare Authorship Studies at the British University of Brunel. The SAChas repeatedly accused the Shakespeare Birthplace
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What’s in a name?
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 32 Number 3, on page 66
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