Oxfordian Theory of Shakespeare Authorship - History of The Oxfordian Theory

History of The Oxfordian Theory

The claim that the works of Shakespeare were in fact written by someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. The original principal alternative candidate was Francis Bacon, but by the beginning of the twentieth century other candidates, typically aristocrats, were put forward, most notably Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland and William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby. The Oxford theory was first proposed by J. Thomas Looney in his 1920 book Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Following earlier anti-Stratfordians, Looney argued that the known facts of Shakespeare's life did not fit the personality he ascribed to the author of the plays. Shakespeare had a petty "acquisitive disposition", he said, while the plays made heroes of free-spending figures. They also portrayed middle and lower-class people negatively, while Shakespearean heroes were typically aristocratic. Looney considered that Oxford's personality fitted that he deduced from the plays, and also identified characters in the plays as detailed portraits of Oxford's family and personal contacts. Several characters, including Hamlet and Bertram (in All's Well that Ends Well), were, he believed, self-portraits. Adapting arguments earlier used for Rutland and Derby, Looney fitted events in the plays to episodes in Oxford's life, including his travels to France and Italy, the settings for many plays. Oxford's death in 1604 was linked to a drop-off in the publication of Shakespeare plays. Looney declared that the late play The Tempest was not written by Oxford, and that others performed or published after Oxford's death were most probably left incomplete and finished by other writers, thus explaining the apparent idiosyncrasies of style found in the late Shakespeare plays. Looney also introduced the argument that the reference to the "ever-living poet" in the 1609 dedication to Shakespeare's sonnets implied that the author was dead at the time of publication.

Sigmund Freud, the novelist Marjorie Bowen, and several 20th-century celebrities found the thesis persuasive, and Oxford soon overtook Bacon as the favoured alternative candidate to Shakespeare, though academic Shakespeareans mostly ridiculed or ignored the claims. Looney's theory attracted a number of activist followers who published books supplementing his own and added new arguments, most notably Percy Allen, Bernard M. Ward, Louis P. Bénézet and Charles Wisner Barrell. In 1921, Sir George Greenwood, Looney, and others founded The Shakespeare Fellowship, an organization originally dedicated to the discussion and promotion of ecumenical anti-Stratfordian views, but which later became devoted to promoting Oxford as the true Shakespeare.