The Authorship Question

Max Beerbohm, “William Shakespeare, his method of work”, satirising Baconian theories, 1904

It’s no secret – there have been oodles of questions raised in the last 170 years about who wrote these plays and poems. It’s also no secret – to those of you who’ve listened to Episode 6 – that I think the whole thing is a bundle of hokum. Nevertheless, for your reading pleasure, I provide below a host of links and documents, including several full-length books as PDF files, that have been at the forefront of this so-called controversy. Happy reading!

SIR FRANCIS BACON (1561 – 1626)

on Wikipedia
His works at Wikisource
John Aubrey’s biography and details of his death in Brief Lives (1693)
Francis Bacon: An Authorship Analysis
The Francis Bacon Society (“Baconiana”)

Supporters of Bacon

Delia Salter Bacon (1811 – 1859):

at Wikipedia
“William Shakespeare and His Plays: An Enquiry Concerning Them” in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American literature, science and art, Issue 37, January 1856 – PDF
The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, 1857 – PDF
Nina Baym, “Delia Bacon: Hawthorne’s Last Heroine“
Drinks With Dead People: Delia Bacon
“Delia Bacon: The Woman Who Hated Shakespeare“
Nina Baym, “Delia Bacon, History’s Odd Woman Out“ in The New England Quarterly, Vol 69 No 2, June 1996 (JSTOR access required.)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Recollections of a Gifted Woman” in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1863 – PDF
Ralph Waldo Emerson, unpublished letter to George P. Putnam regarding Delia Bacon, published by Vivian C. Hopkins in the New England Quarterly, vol 33 no 4, Dec 1960 (JSTOR access required)
Catherine E. Beecher, Truth Stranger than Fiction (1850) comments on the Bacon/MacWhorter affair without using names – PDF to come
Grave, at Find-a-Grave

Walt Whitman:

“Shakespeare Bacon’s Cipher”
“What Lurks Behind Shakespeare’s Historical Plays?“ from November Boughs (1892)
More thoughts in Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, vol. 3 (1914)

Ignatius Donnelly:

The Great Cryptogram (1888) – PDF
The cipher in the plays, and on the tomb-stone (1900) – PDF to come
see also Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882)

Elizabeth Ward Gallup:

The Bi-Lateral Cypher (1910) –PDF
The Tragedy of Anne Boleyn, being a discovery of the ciphered play of Sir Francis Bacon inside the Shakespeare First Folio (1911) – PDF
[see also, this article on the play at Anne Boleyn Novels]

Dr. Orville Ward Owen, Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story (1893-95) – PDF

Mark Twain:

Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909)
1601: A Fireside conversation in the time to the Good Queen Bess in which diverse persons of reknown hold converse on concerns personal and intimate. (1880, originally published anonymously) – PDF to come

Henry W. Fisher, Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field, Tales they told to a fellow correspondent, (1922) – PDF – see page 49 for Twain and Fisher’s anecdote Queen Elizabeth being a man.

Walter Conrad Arensberg:

The Cryptography of Shakespeare -(1922) – PDF
see also The Cryptography of Dante – (1921)

Anonymous, “Who Wrote Shakespeare?“, Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, August 7, 1852, no. 449

James M. Barrie quoted on Bacon (comedically):

“I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.”

Baconiana magazine, issue VI, Third Series, no 23, July 1908 – PDF – see page 193 for the claim by R.A. Smith that a Mr. Return Jonathan Meigs discovered Bacon’s identity independent of Delia Bacon.

“In 1844, Mr. Return Jonathan Meigs in Nashville TN was reading Bacon in the original Latin. He suddenly closed the book and exclaimed: “This man Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare.”

EDWARD DE VERE, 17TH EARL OF OXFORD (1550 – 1604)

at Wikipedia
Poems at Wikisource
Family tree and the famous fart anecdote of James Aubrey
“Renunciation” poem from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, ed. Francis T. Palgrave, 1875

Supporters of Oxford

John Thomas Looney (1870 – 1944)

at Wikipedia
The Church of Humanity
Shakespeare Identified in Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1920) PDF
Christopher Paul, A new letter by J.T. Looney brought to light, published in the Summer 2007 issues of the Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, vol 43, no 3 – PDF link

The De Vere Society of Great Britain

The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship – se

Why I Became an Oxfordian at the “Shakespeare Authorship Sourcebook”

Charlton Ogburn:

The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth and the Reality (1984)
“The Man Who Shakespeare Was Not (and who he was)“, Harvard Magazine, November 1974

Michael Brame and Galina Propova, Shakespeare’s Fingerprints (2002), discussed in Washington University News, January 23, 2003

Percy Allen, Life Story of Edward De Vere (1932) – PDF

Richard F. Whalen (ed), Macbeth, annotated from an Oxfordian perspective, Oxfordian Shakespeare Series

C.S. Lewis dismissed Oxford in Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century (1944)

Trailer for Anonymous, directed by Roland Emmerich (2011)

GENERAL DOUBT

The Declaration of Reasonable Doubt
Malcolm X on Shakespeare’s identity, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) via Reddit
Hester Dowden, the medium who apparently confirmed both Bacon and Oxford had written the plays, at different times – at Wikipedia.
and Edmund Bentley, Far Horizon: A Biography of Hester Dowden, Medium and Psychic Investigator (1951)
Eric Idle, “Who Wrote Shakespeare?” (comedy), The New Yorker, November 21, 2011
Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet (1916), references the code-hunters:

“He was like nothing, I told him, but the maniacs who embrace some bedlamitical theory of the cryptic character of Shakespeare. To this he replied that if we had had Shakespeare’s own word for his being cryptic he would at once have accepted it.”

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564 – 1616)

The First Folio at the Bodleian online

Shakespeare suing for minor debts – at ShakespeareDocumented.org

The Shakespeare Authorship Page – a vital resource

David Kathman:

“Why I Am Not An Oxfordian“, originally published in The Elizabethan Review, at the Shakespeare Authorship Page
“Shakespeare’s Eulogies“ at the Shakespeare Authorship Page
“Dating the Tempest“
“How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts“ with Tom Reedy
“Critically Examining Oxfordian Claims”, Part 5: “Oxford’s Bible“

James Shapiro, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010)

Irvin Leigh Matus:

“The Case for Shakespeare“, The Atlantic, October 1991
Shakespeare in Fact, Continuum, 1994

Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, 1970

William F. Friedman & Elizebeth Smith Friedman:

Wikipedia: He | She
The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined, Cambridge, 1957

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men – chapter 6 “Shakespeare or the Poet” (1850) – PDF

Terry Ross, “The Code that Failed: Testing a Bacon-Shakespeare Cipher“ at The Shakespeare Authorship Page

Don Foster:

Elegy for WS, reviewed in The Observer, June 2002
Debate about Foster’s work at “Shakespeare Authorship Site“

The moot trials of Shakespeare:

1987 trial – at PBS
1987 trial – the New York Times
A 1993 trial at the Boston American Bar Association – at PBS

Alan Nelson’s sadly defunct website featured discussion of historical evidence of Shakespeare’s literacy, Oxford’s degeneracy, and interesting revelations about Elizabethan and Jacobean lives – available at The Web Archive

Giles Dawson and Laetitia Kennedy-Skipton, The Survival of Manuscripts, from Elizabethan Handwriting, 1500-1650: A Manual, W.W. Norton & Co, 1966 at The Shakespeare Authorship Site

Lytton Strachey, “Shakespeare’s Final Period” (1906) in Books and Characters (1922) – PDF to come

David Chandler, Historicizing Difference: Anti-Stratfordians and the Academy published in the Elizabethan Review (1991) – PDF to come

E.K. Chambers, “The Disintegration of Shakespeare” in Shakespearean Gleanings (1944) – PDF to come

Muriel St Clare Byrne, “The Social Background“, in A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, page 190, edited by Harley Granville Barker and G.B Harrison (1934)

William Wordsworth, Scorn not the Sonnet (c. 1807)

Robert Browning, House (1876)

Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8-vol (1957 – 1975), at the Play Shakespeare document library

Robert Bell Wheler: