If Shakespeare was a nobleman hiding behind a pen name, he would not have been unique on the court of Elizabeth I, merely the most famous. On the other hand, if he WAS the man from Stratford, he WOULD be unique, in having created so massive a body of work without leaving so much as a single scrap of evidence that he had done so.

On the matter of de Vere, the most extraordinary element of his candidacy is that his life is full of intersections with Shakespeare and the plays. In this sense Oxford is almost the polar opposite of the Stratford man, whose KNOWN life (as distinct from conjectures) affords virtually no connection to the Author or his works.

The notion that Shakespeare picked up all his detailed intimacy with what he wrote about also does not wash. Others DID do this -- Ben Jonson for one-- and their work is full of factual errors and misuse or overuse of terminology.

"The evidence is far from circumstantial"

So there are credible, contemporaneous witnesses who have explicitly written down that they know Edward DeVere wrote plays under the pen name "Shakespeare" because they actually witnessed him do it? Or are you using a "special" definition of circumstantial evidence that is different from the regular one?

Not that there's anything wrong with circumstantial evidence, much of history is written based on circumstantial evidence. But a claim that evidence on the "underdog" side in a controversy (that is not controversial among the great majority of academics working on the era and the topic of Shakespeare) is not circumstantial (and therefore presumably direct, solid evidence like an unimpeachable eyewitness account )  is pretty spectacular.

To some extent the "Authorship question" is the literary equivalent of the "Evolution/ ID controversy" and the "Global Warming controversy" in that it's not really a controversy at all. Not to most experts.

And to claim that there is now DIRECT evidence? That does not require decoding or interpretation? That's pretty big.

There may be more to the authorship question than we currently know (or treat as official knowledge) but I would think that if there was direct evidence in favor of De Vere, we would have heard of it sooner.

The only (possibly) direct evidence we have is that the name William Shakespeare was attached to the plays and there is some paperwork about a man with a name similar enough that it may be the same, only with the sloppy spelling of the time, that may qualify as direct evidence. Everything else about the Stratford Man or anyone else seems to be circumstantial  (inferred and interpreted. )

Now, I'm willing to entertain the idea that there is somebody else involved in the authorship, but even just browsing through a summary/overview of the controversy, it seems to boil down to an idea of the guy from Stratford being "too common".  He's not a lord or an earl or doesn't have a formal education at University, doesn't hobnob enough with lords, ladies and the Queen, and therefore he's not "worthy" to be "Shakespeare".  And for a commoner to manage something like that, it would make him unique. Imagine that. Shakespeare being unique. Perish the thought.

Which gets my hackles up. Seems to me pure snobbery. It's the equivalent of saying there can't be Global Warming because it snows in places that are usually too hot for snow this time of year.

When renowned Shakespeare scholars question the methodology, the inferences, the lack of academic rigour in anti-Stratfordians it seems hauntingly familiar.

Not to say that the Academic establishment are never wrong, or never blinded by their own academic prejudices, but it would take a lot for the great majority of scholars to dismiss direct evidence. So that's a warning bell for me.

Especially as I found the same type of jarring assumptions myself when reading Ogburn. As I've said before, in other threads, as a linguist it is often quite easy to spot bad, unreliable scholarship just from the rhetorical devices, assumptions too quickly embraced and certain "I'm the victim and they're denying the truth" attitudes.

Maybe I'm being too hard on Ogburn, and one of these days I should probably make the effort to read the whole book, but it seems like a lot of reaching.

Especially as it doesn't affect the plays themselves.

I'm in luck! Not only am I very interested in this subject (good place to start), but the local library system has a copy in circulation.

Good luck, Michael Penn, and all you others looking for this book.

My favorite author is Dick Francis and he too has been accused of not being the real writer of his work. The argument being that his wife was an English Major and how could an undereducated Jockey possibly have written such tense and suspenseful novels?

There is much circumstantial evidence that Dick's wife Mary was more than an editor but just from my reading (and rereading, and rereading, and rereading) of his work I came to a conclusion that made sense to me: He wrote the early novels but Mary heavily edited them, making them cleaner and better. As the novels progressed she felt free to write around his work, creating more depth in the details (I also feel the extra details and length slowed down the plot and took away some of Dick's unique writing flavor) and that's the way they worked together for years and at that point she was a co-writer (though I think the ideas probably originated with Dick as well as the main characters and plots). When she died Dick Francis seemed to have stopped writing which gave credence to the rumors that he was just a figurehead for his wife.

Then he released a novel that had all the writing flavor of his early novels, some problems with the plotting, and characters that could have used editing but basically it felt like the early Francis. So the rumors switched to his son Felix (a physics teacher) as the new real writer (which made no sense because flavor is hard to fake and how could a young boy have written those first novels?). That then seemed confirmed with the next book that had Dick and Felix's names on the cover. But the first half of that book is great and the second half plods (as if it was written by a physics teacher).

Normally I don't pay attention to those kinds of rumors but the snobbery just stunned me; the basic assumption that a jockey, (a blue collar worker basically. A commoner.) COULD NOT have written that work and that they had to search for the real writer....

Which is why when I first encountered that Shakespeare authorship question I dismissed it out of hand as the same kind of nonsensical snobbery. But then I read a few books, saw a few specials and talked about it with some English majors of my acquaintance and came to a conclusion: I have no idea who wrote those plays. I don't think the evidence is compelling enough to point definitively in any single direction but my mind is now open to the possibility.

Though I think it's fair to say that it's a singular writer, as in the same one person wrote all of those plays. The meter and the flavor certainly feels like the same author to me.

No denial, because the question would simply not be asked.