Why is there an authorship question?

"The plays were really written by an intemperate Arab elder, Sheikh Pir."--Indian joke

The authorship question isn't only about facts: It's about ourselves: what we believe, why we believe it, what we want to believe in.

Almost everyone wants to believe in William Shakespeare of Stratford.

He's the man. Four hundred years of tradition says he is. Ben Jonson, who knew Shakespeare, said Shakespeare was from Stratford: "When time destroys thy Stratford monument." Case closed, right?

More than that, he is an icon of human possibility. William Shakespeare, son of a glover from a bankrupt town in the Midlands, became the greatest writer in the English language. Now there's a story.

It is not a story when one of the richest men in England, with every advantage money could give him, became the greatest writer in the English language. Even if he had to do it behind a mask.

Or is it?

Of course it is.

If it's about Shakespeare.

We owe it to Shakespeare to find out who he was. We owe it to ourselves to ask. No one has said it better than Sir Derek Jacobi:

It's not enough to say, "Oh, but the works of Shakespeare survive whoever wrote them; it doesn't therefore matter. Yes, it does! The disclosure of the real author would enhance not only the historical significance but also the contemporary excitement of these treasures for both actors and spectators....

I've gathered together some of the more interesting scholarly arguments here.

The case for and against William Shakespeare of Stratford

• Shakespeare, Dickens, and Machado de Assis--why not to worry about Shakespeare
• The biographical Stratford and anti-Stratford: Stephen Greenblatt's, Park Honan's, Michael Wood's, Diana Price's, and earlier biographies
• Jonson's eulogy of Shakespeare
• Shakespeare's lost years and the playwright's experience
• Shakespeare's library: Where did he get his books?

The case for and against Edward de Vere

• The biographical Oxford and anti-Oxford: Mark Anderson's, Alan Nelson's, earlier biographies
• Oxford's dates versus the dating of the plays
• Oxford's travels and the playwright's experience
• Oxford's library: Where did he get his books?
• A comparative authorship timeline
• The theory behind all this: the "Theory of casual references"

A new Shakespeare poem?

My own major contribution to the Shakespeare authorship was quite unexpected. Halfway through writing the book--which was then quite another kind of book--I had the delight of finding and identifying a big new poem by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Couldn't leave that on the table, no sir, so I rewrote the book around it.

The attribution has since been accepted by Alan Nelson, Steven May, and Mark Anderson, all the leading Oxford scholars.

The poem is rather exciting not for its poetic quality--though some of it is very nice indeed--but because in it de Vere does a lot of the things that Shakespeare also does. Joe's discovery of the poem is a turning point in both the book and the play.

How Shakespearean is it? You decide. It is available in two versions:

• HTML (fully searchable)
• PDF (printable)

Want to know more?

Since Joe and Posy first walked the streets of London, Charlton Ogburn's The Mysterious William Shakespeare has been supplanted as the best modern Oxford biography by Mark Anderson's Shakespeare by Another Name.

Mark's bias is obvious from the name: this is a book that argues that Edward de Vere wrote the Shakespeare works. And it's brilliantly convincing. Of its 600 pages, fully 150 are footnotes, most taken from sources that do not question that William Shakespeare of Stratford is Shakespeare; and, time and again, Anderson connects de Vere's experience and Shakespeare's works.

I was an agnostic. Now I do believe there's a case, and I've nailed my colors to the mast by blurbing the book.

If you have the slightest interest in the Shakespeare authorship, buy a copy of Mark's book.