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.

Everyone wants to believe in William Shakespeare of Stratford.

He's the man. Four hundred years of tradition says he is. 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, becomes the greatest writer in the English language. Even if he did 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, even if we don't think we'll like the answer. We owe it to ourselves. 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, and it shouldn't be regarded as potential professional suicide, heresy or an actor's silliness to come out and say so...The restrictive orthodox analysis must be open to seriously considered debate.

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

Full disclosure: I started out absolutely sure that William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare of Stratford. Since then I've done a lot of research. Until I read Mark Anderson's Shakespeare by Another Name, I was an agnostic. Now I believe Mark, and nailed my colors to the mast by blurbing the book.

Shakespeare by Another Name is a brilliant biography. Of its 600 pages, fully 150 are footnotes, most taken from sources that do not question that William Shakespeare of Stratford is Shakespeare. It is thoroughly grounded in scholarship but reads very easily.

Find out why the Shakespeare authorship can be taken seriously; rush out and buy a copy of Mark's book.

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)