Stratfordian
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[edit] Stratfordian
[edit] Did William Shakespeare write the plays attributed to him?
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Hillo! This page is dedicated to the ongoing debate as to whether the real author of the works known as the plays of William Shakespeare grew up in a middle-class household in a provincial capital, or was, in fact, a hereditary lord or some other noted and powerful man, seeking to disguise his identity due to the ribald and controversial nature of his writings.
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My personal sentiments concerning the debate:
The argument that a writer from a provincial English county seat in the 16nth century could not write anything of note is not new. However, to attribute rough and rustic, even anti-monarchist sentiments to a hereditary English lord is equally baffling. The recurring themes of Royal ruin, decline and oppression, even of noble madness and incest cloaked in the robes of a foreign court, indicate to me tht the real Shakespeare was a populist and a patriot, even though it has been said that his ornate language was genuine, a result of his devotion to his mother's cause. She, evidently, was of noble lineage, a Strafordian peerage of some antiquity.
Everywhere and always there will be those who belief in the innate and unquestionable justice of the prevailing social system. In the case of the "natural order," such a belief would dictate that noble blood is better blood, and enables its bearers to do greater things. The Hellenic principle of aristos, a meritocracy of talent and achievement, is assumed to underly the enoblement of ancestral lines. The English monarchical practice of "knighting," or bequeathing titles on individuals for outstanding achievements reinforces this assumption.
However, good or great writing is unlike most social achievements, in that an intellectual separation from the daily world, the mundane, predisposes the writer to the fanciful and extraordinary, even the supreme, just as we find in such abundance in many, if not most of Shakespeare's works. "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia," as E.L. Doctorow wrote. Thus, if we are looking for a more socially acceptable (noble) image for the greatest wordsmith of English letters, if not all time, our quest will likely prove more futile than profitable.
If, in keeping with the above-stated sentiment, we wish to believe that genius must and will be rewarded in the world of letters, the facts stand to the contrary. Many, if not most writers, have lived lives of paucity and penuriousness. It is the teachers of letters, not the subjects of their classes, that wax fat with fees paid by wealthy students to the institutions which employ them.
As for the students, themselves, almost all seeking livelihoods outside of the teaching professions turn up their noses at the "gut courses," the arts and humanities, and seek a living in the engineering professions, architecture or science, thereby reaffirming that eternal verity. Writing is a kind of falling, if not failing, a long descent into what may end up as a fatal entanglement with the publishing industry, or in the case of a playwrite, with actors and producers.
Thus, the fact that Shakespeare survived in London at all on the strength of his writing skills, ultimately to return to live out his remaining days in his hometown, is surprising yet credible. That he failed to become intimate with his neighbors and townspeople upon his return, remaining a kind of outcast or recluse, would be quite in character with a man who wrote for the stage at a time when a substantial number of Englishmen wanted to ban the theatre, altogether, and whose own family had suffered from the reputation of the theatre in those days.
There will follow this short essay a list of links to points in the text which point to an origin for the writer, whoever he was, outside of Oxford's circle of noble acquaintances. As to hard evidence, as written this month in the Smithsonian magazine, there is absolutely no reason to assume that anything of a material nature would or could be collected, saved or endure centuries of changing fashions in the literary world, such as might prove to be the physical evidence longed for in the debate over who the real author of the Complete Works of Shakespeare was.
John Sebastian DeGrazia
Here's a site devoted to the issue
