In 1949, because of disputes over the editorialization of radio news broadcasters during the previous decade, the FCC established a policy called the Fairness Doctrine, which would require licensed broadcasters to devote air time to opposing views on controversial issues important to the public. While this may sound positive, it’s somewhat more complicated than it may appear at first blush. The policy was widely used in the 1960s to silence political speech, as complaints to the FCC about rural broadcasters who could not afford to provide airtime to those espousing counterpoints led in a lot of cases to a general chilling effect on free speech. But when it was repealed, the country saw a surge in biased political speech and misinformation. This was the era in which Rush Limbaugh became a sensation, mostly because the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine allowed his very one-sided program to go national. Limbaugh called any subsequent legislation to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine “Hush Rush” bills. Today, in an age of biased and unreliable news sources pushing conspiracy theory and misinformation, there have been further efforts to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, but many protest that such a policy could result in the amplification of nonsense, with the notion that opposing views on any topic must be given equal weight. Imagine a world in which programs about the Holocaust would be forced to present the claims of denialists uncritically, when newscasters covering the election would be forced to present conspiracy theories about election fraud as if they had equal weight. The post-truth era would have reached it most terrifying conclusion. And it is certain that the Fairness Doctrine would be exploited in this way. It already was. Before its repeal, Charlton Ogburn, the man who had in the ‘60s and ‘70s tirelessly rehabilitated the Oxfordian Theory of the authorship of works attributed to Shakespeare, had tried to use it to promote his theories, appealing based on the policy for equal time in a certain National Geographic television production on Shakespeare so that he could cast doubt on Shakespeare’s authorship. This notion that anti-Stratfordian views deserved equal footing and consideration on par with traditional historical views about Shakespeare and his works is what lay at the root of his efforts to arrange the mock trials in both America and Britain—that the Shakespeare denialists should be taken seriously, that their views deserved a fair shake. It was thus a devastating blow when in both trials it was determined at the outset that, since anti-Stratfordians were challenging established history, the burden of proof was on them. Because of the general refusal of the scholarly community to grant his views equal weight with consensus views, Ogburn cried conspiracy and cover-up. He claimed that academia was silencing anti-Stratfordians because their theories challenged the status quo, calling it an “academic Watergate.” Again, it was all very much like the claims of Creationists, who wanted religious doctrine to be granted equal footing with scientific principles and cried suppression when they didn’t get their way. Twice in this series I have acknowledged some instances of genuine suppression by academics: when Edmund Malone did not make public a document proving that some of Shakespeare’s works may have been collaborations and when a scholar talked Putnam’s out of printing more of Delia Bacon’s theories. But a vast scholarly conspiracy these instances do not establish. After all, on Malone’s death, another scholar did publish the document, and it must be remembered that Putnam’s had published some of Delia Bacon’s work already, and no one prevented the subsequent printing of her book. The simple fact that Oxfordians managed to get a graduate program established in one school demonstrates that there is no cover up. Rather, there is only a failure on their part to convince the academic world to take their claims seriously, and that is because they reject the burden of proof. In 2007, when Brunel University started its authorship studies program, a document was drafted by Oxfordians and signed by some famous stage actors, Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, called the “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare.” This document, which continues to gather signatures online, focuses not on the case for Oxford, but rather on the case for Shakespeare being the Bard, shifting the burden of proof by claiming that Shakespeare’s authorship is more questionable, and declaring that “the identity of William Shakespeare should, henceforth, be regarded in academia as a legitimate issue for research and publication.” So in the spirit of fairness, we will now lay out, in the clearest of terms, the case for Shakespeare which has so convinced historians that any alternative theories must meet a high bar of evidentiary proof.

There is a reason I bring up the Fairness Doctrine, beyond its connection to Ogburn and his efforts to see Oxfordianism taken seriously. Before this series got started, I had a patron of the program express reservations about the choice of topic. Her comments raised an idea that I think is worth exploring: whether or not a claim that has been debunked again and again is worthy of bringing up and rehashing. This is something I often find myself wresting with because of the nature of my podcast. As I discussed at length in my talk at Sound Education at Harvard Divinity, audio of which you can find in the podcast feed, I don’t think critical thinkers and skeptics should shrink from addressing dubious and false claims, whether wrong or even dangerous—perhaps especially if they are dangerous. Even claims that have already been thoroughly debunked can be further debunked or can have their refutation amplified through further discussion. Most of the topics I have covered have already been thoroughly debunked over and over, like conspiracies about the Illuminati or Templars, but recoiling from covering those topics because we might find them distasteful or problematic or even embarrassing or silly gives misinformation the edge. Those who promote them certainly aren’t avoiding them; they work tirelessly creating content that amplifies misinformation and conspiracy theory. And there will always be people looking these claims up. If they find more material out there promoting whatever false claim has caught their interest, they may be more likely to fall for it. It’s a continual battle in which I feel I’m doing my part by producing content that refutes misinformation. I do, however, understand the views of some in the academic community and the news media that to give any air to misinformation is to strengthen it. I recently had a listener email me saying he was a conspiracy theorist who disagrees with everything I say but listens to the podcast to learn where his favorite conspiracy theories come from. I admit that is extremely discouraging, the idea that despite my greatest efforts, my work might actually arm a conspiracist with some information they can use to convince others. However, I reject the entire notion that if we just ignore these topics they will go away. How many times have we seen something like the Protocols of Zion forgery be debunked over and over yet continue to be touted and spread as if it never was debunked. The promoters of misinformation will likely always outnumber its opponents, so I believe it is important to continually fight it, so that falsehood doesn’t get the final word. Although there are tricky problems with policies like the Fairness Doctrine, I feel it important that there are people persistently making the effort to provide opposing views on unreliable claims. But at the same time, I don’t intend to offer equal time or present such topics as having equal weight. I have always tried to be frank about what is BS and why. And here at the end of my series on the Shakespeare authorship question, I hope to establish once and for all why Shakespeare’s authorship should not and indeed should never have been questioned.

First and foremost, we should look at some ways the anti-Stratfordian theories have never and cannot meet the burden of proof. I have endeavored to reveal this throughout the series, pointing out numerous ways their assumptions and interpretations lack merit or have been proven wrong. I am hopeful that it has become apparent that each of these theories rests on far more unproven conjectures than does the authorship of Shakespeare. In order to account for the problems that anti-Stratfordians see with his authorship, we need only reason that some documentation of his life may have been lost or that he simply happened not to leave behind certain personal papers, something that was common of many an Elizabethan. But to support any other candidate, entire vast conspiracies need be imagined. And the nature of the conspiracy, how it worked, is not only unproven but often quite vague. Was William Shakespeare simply a pseudonym adopted by the true writer, and the existence of another by that name a coincidence? Was the pseudonym adopted because of the existence of the actor? In which case, why would the actor allow it? Was some arrangement made, such that the actor by that name benefitted from the arrangement? Anti-Stratfordians all disagree on the particulars, making it nothing more than a set of competing fictions. Since the plays performed by Shakespeare’s companies, Lord Chamberlain’s Men and later the King’s Men, actually belonged to the companies, of which William Shakespeare was only a partial shareholder, early publications of the plays certainly did not enrich him, and since the collected plays were not published in the First Folio until after his death, he did not earn a penny from it. So if this imaginary arrangement did occur, it benefitted the author not at all, and benefitted Shakespeare only insofar as he acquired new plays for his company to perform and perhaps earned himself a reputation as a writer. Most of the theories have it that the true author simply didn’t want to be known as the author, because there was some stigma attached to the art, and yet many of the leading candidates were already known to have been poets and playwrights, so this motive makes no sense. And if the true author sought only to see their works performed and not be credited, it could have been arranged for the plays to be anonymous. Many were the anonymously penned plays performed in London at the time, and many were the plays published anonymously, so just the simple notion that the true author would have to or even want to have someone else’s name put on the works falls apart under closer consideration.

Let us further entertain the notion that not only was it an embarrassment for a nobleman to be involved with playwriting and, to a lesser extent, poetry, but also that there was some hidden and radical message within the works attributed to Shakespeare, which would be further reason for even a gentleman known to dabble in literature to distance himself from the work. This is the argument that some anti-Stratfordians make, such that the true author simply could not risk putting their name on it, so they wanted or needed a front man or fall guy. Even if we swallow all of this, we must consider the risks that both parties were assuming in such an arrangement. Back in 1593, one writer, Thomas Kyd, was arrested on suspicion of producing “mutinous libels,” and was ruthlessly tortured until he informed on other writers, namely Christopher Marlowe, whose suspicious stabbing occurred in the midst of the scandal. This repressive atmosphere suggests that if William Shakespeare were approached with an arrangement to put his name on potentially seditious plays, he likely would have refused, and if there were some other author wanting to hide his authorship, he wouldn’t reveal himself to the man whose name he wished to put on the works, as then his authorship would come out under torture. All of these were unnecessary risks because, again, anonymous plays were common. For some further insight, it is worthwhile to look at what actually happened when a satirical play that had not been anonymously written actually did displease the Queen and her Privy Councilors. In 1597, a play called The Isle of Dogs, in reference to a certain palace where the Queen kenneled her dogs and where the Privy Council met, seems to have satirized either the Queen herself and/or certain of her nobility and was thus declared seditious. We don’t know exactly how it satirized them today, since the play was suppressed, though there are guesses. The Isle of Dogs was a place where river sewage accumulated, so it may be that the play compared the Queen and her counselors meeting there to the excrement collecting there. Alternatively, considering the title, the Privy Council may have been satirized as dogs, the Queen’s dogs, like lapdogs. Regardless, the Council had three of the actors who performed in the play arrested, one of them being a coauthor of the play, Ben Jonson, a close associate and rival of William Shakespeare’s. With an additional standing order to apprehend everyone involved, the entire playing company that put on the play, Pembroke’s Men, had to go on the run for a while. The Isle of Dogs incident had a chilling effect on satire in the theater, such that few playwrights and few companies would risk their livelihoods by staging anything that might seem seditious. This makes it unlikely that William Shakespeare would even put his entire company at risk by staging plays that might have been subversive, let alone that he would want to put his name on such material. By this reasoning, it is entirely unlikely that any of the hidden messages later anti-Stratfordians imagine are hidden in the plays were ever actually intended by their author. If they were, they were so well hidden that censors of the time did not catch them, and neither did audiences, at which point, what would have even been the purpose?

A woodcut of one of the authors of *The Isle of Dogs* depicted in chains.

Those who argue the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays sometimes suggest there were two Shakespeares, that the Shakespeare of Stratford was not so very involved in London theatrical production, and the person writing plays for Lord Chamberlain’s men was simply using a pseudonym that would cause him to be mistaken for the moneylender from Stratford. As evidence, they look at the spelling of his name on legal documents, comparing them to the name as printed on the published works. The man from Stratford appeared to spell his name with no “e” between the “k” and “s,” making it more like Shakspeare, or Shakspere, or even Shaksper! Whereas on the published works, there is the “e” separating the first half of the name from the second, and often, also, a hyphen, making it “Shake-speare.” A-ha! Evidence that they were different men, the anti-Stratfordians cry. But as was the case with many presumptions about ciphers in the plays, a little knowledge of Elizabethan printing dispels the notion. In the fonts used by compositors of the day, the long “s” or swash “s” could not be placed next to the letter “k,” so the “e” or a hyphen or both were needed to separate the letters. In fact, in one document that ascribes authorship of certain plays to Shakespeare, a record of the performances at Whitehall Palace and the “poets which made the plays,” his name is given as Shaxberd, which certainly sounds more like the spelling he used himself, on, for example, his will. Some anti-Stratfordians take this further, arguing that the variation in spelling even in documents signed with his own hand proves that William Shakespeare was illiterate. After all, he spelled his own name two different ways on his will. But this assertion too rests on ignorance, for it is well known that no clear sense of correct spelling emerged in the English language until the 18th century. Until that time, words and names were largely spelled phonetically. If anti-Stratfordians want to claim that variation in spelling his name meant Shakespeare was illiterate, then that meant other candidates, like Marlowe and Oxford, who also spelled their names different ways, must also have been illiterate.

The flip side of the argument that only someone with access to the royal court and the life of the nobility could have written so convincingly about courtiers and noblemen is the far more convincing assertion that only a member of a playing company could have written the plays for that playing company. The evidence is in the plays themselves. The person who wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare had intimate knowledge of players in Lord Chamberlain’s Men and was writing plays with exactly the number of important roles for the major players in the company. Since women were forbidden from acting at the time, the author could only write substantial female roles when it was known that a boy actor capable of doing the part justice was available, and the availability of strong boy actors changed as frequently as their voices. More than that, it is apparent that Shakespeare was writing parts with specific actors in mind. It is one thing to imagine that the playwright had the tragedian actor Richard Burbage in mind when creating the characters of Lear and Hamlet, and that he crafted the recurring character of Falstaff specifically for the comedic actor William Kemp, and it is quite another to find actual documentary evidence of the fact, which we have. Although the original manuscripts are lost, some elements of them can still be discerned in early quarto publications and the First Folio, in which, on occasion, stage directions accidentally refer to characters by the actor’s name. There is even a remnant of one performance of 1 Henry IV that indicates an alternative epilogue had been written for the Whitehall Palace performance, in which the author, himself clearly a member of the company, takes the stage to address the Queen and beg forgiveness if she had not enjoyed the preceding play, reciting lines that he specifically says are “of my own making,” and saying that “I was lately here in the end of a displeasing play, to pray your patience for it, and to promise a better.” So it is clear that Henry the Fourth was meant to be the better play he had promised to write when next his company performed for her. What this epilogue appears to support, then, as my principal source, Contested Will by James Shapiro convincingly argues, is that the plays of Shakespeare had to have been written by a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, one who worked with them, a fellow actor, not some nobleman who had died years earlier or who did not wish to be associated with the company, or who worked with some rival company, or who lived abroad in exile. This, of course, eliminates most every other candidate—Oxford, Bacon, Derby, Marlowe—leaving only Shakespeare, who was known to be an actor and shareholder in that company.

Examples of Shakespeare’s signature, showing variation in spelling

As a further example of evidence in the works that indicates the author of the plays was working day to day among the playing company known to perform the plays attributed to Shakespeare, we can look at Shakespeare’s late style. During the last several years of Shakespeare’s life, when under King James his company took the name the King’s Men, the plays they performed adopted a different style, turning from tragedy and comedy to tragicomedy, and a denser, unrhyming style of verse. Much has been made of this evolution of his style, with some scholars claiming it shows his waning interest in making sure his work is accessible to audiences. While this may be part of the explanation, other critics have pointed out that Shakespeare was not the only playwright developing this style in those years, which suggests that it was a developing style of the period. This, then, would again disprove the authorship of Oxford, who had long been dead; Oxfordians would claim that Edward de Vere was writing in very different styles all during the same period, which is harder to believe than that Shakespeare slowly moved toward this style along with his contemporaries. And it was during this Jacobean period that the King’s Men started playing at Blackfriars. This theater was right in London and had previously been drawing large audiences who came to see children’s companies performing tragicomedies. Thus, when the King’s Men began playing there, it made sense to give their audience what they wanted, which were tragicomedies, featuring lots of dancing. It is telling that all the Shakespearian plays that appeared during this period suddenly included lots of dancing. A big part of writing plays was not only shaping the story with the number of parts matching the number of actors, such that the company had enough performers for every character that would appear on stage at any one time, and that actors playing two roles could not play two characters who interacted, but how the actors would exit and enter a scene or descend and ascend from balconies. Plays were written for theaters as much as they were for actors, and this is clearly seen in the plays written to be performed at Blackfriars. The stage was far smaller than others they played, like the outdoor Globe theater, so suddenly the far-ranging sword fights that had been a staple of Shakespeare’s plays are no longer present. With poor natural lighting, long breaks had to be written into the plays so that candles could be trimmed. And since Blackfriars audiences expected constant entertainment, this meant musicians had to be kept on hand to play through the breaks. So lo and behold, in plays from those years, there are far more mentions of musical effects, made possible by the presence of the musicians. All of these elements indicate that the writer of the plays was present, working with actors, blocking the action, orchestrating every particular. And the only candidate known to be working so closely with the playing company was the original candidate, the man who had always been credited with writing the plays, the man no one doubted had been their author for some 150 years: William Shakespeare himself.

Some anti-Stratfordians will act like there is no contemporary evidence of the existence of the actor and acting company share-holder William Shakespeare aside from the name printed on published versions of the play. In their depiction, there is just the few signatures on legal documents in Stratford and the name on the quarto and folio editions of the plays. But of course, there is far more than that. Shakespeare was mentioned by numerous contemporaries as a rising star of poetry and the theater. In 1592, a fellow writer, Robert Greene, called him an “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and…is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” To interpret, Greene was suggesting Shakespeare thought he was better than every other writer, but that he borrowed heavily from them. What’s perhaps more telling, though, is that in his line about a tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide, parodying a line from Shakespeare’s Henry the Sixth, he calls him a “player,” or actor. After his narrative poems were published in 1593 and ’94, the literati begin to refer to him by name, and he starts to even get nicknames, like “Sweet Shakspeare.” A few years later, in Francis Mere’s Palladis Tamia, in a section on English Poets, calls him “honey-tongued Shakespeare,” remarking on his excellence as both a poet and a playwright. This name seems to have stuck, as John Weever, in 1599, writing in a Shakespearian-style sonnet, refers again to “Honey-tongued Shakespeare.” In those same years, an anonymous play called Parnassus appears to show Shakespeare already being idolized to the point of deification in his own lifetime, with characters saying they “shall have nothing but pure Shakespeare,” and that they shall hang his picture up and “worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare.” Even historians recorded his accomplishments, with William Camden in 1605 listing Shakespeare as one of the “pregnant wits of these our times, whom succeeding ages may justly admire.” Not only was Shakespeare credited in certain publications, such as the printing of his narrative poems and early quarto versions of his plays, but even in the private libraries of gentlemen of the era, his name is handwritten in on versions of his works that had been published anonymously. It is quite apparent that the intelligentsia and literati of London knew who he was and knew what he had written. If they had been duped by a conspiracy, it was a vast conspiracy, and no one involved in it ever let the secret slip in any of their own private documents. And as we have seen over and over, vast conspiracies just aren’t believable.

A depiction of the small stage in the windowless Blackfriars Theatre.

But of course, the anti-Stratfordians only want personal anecdotes, references from those who were close with the man, especially those that can tie him directly to the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, where the man William Shakespeare was known to have lived and died. They claim these don’t exist, but they do. I have already mentioned the anecdotes that establish the fact that the fever Shakespeare died from came on after a drinking bout with the two playwrights Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. And in fact, the clear evidence that Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson were close friends of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon and that they identify this man as the great playwright of London should be the final nail in the coffin of the authorship question. Drayton too was from Warwickshire, and after Shakespeare’s death, he wrote a verse praising his friend by name as being as great “[a]s any one that trafficked with the stage.” Ben Jonson, on the other hand, left behind a more complicated remembrance of the man, as befits two men who were both friends and rivals. Jonson was known to criticize Shakespeare, to call him out when something he’d written was inaccurate or not believable. He once wrote of Shakespeare’s company that “the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech.” Besides demonstrating that Shakespeare was the writer of this company, and the actors all loved him for his writing, it also shows that Ben Jonson was perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest critic and would likely not have kept the secret that Shakespeare was not in fact a writer but was actually taking credit for the writing of someone else. This is important, because the evidence Ben Jonson provides for Shakespeare’s authorship is so irrefutable that anti-Stratfordians are forced to claim Jonson himself must be a conspirator perpetrating the fraud. In the First Folio, which collected the works of Shakespeare in print for the first time, and which included as its frontispiece a portrait printed from a brass engraving of Shakespeare, Jonson provided both an introductory poem and a memorial verse. In the first, he makes clear that the portrait captures well Shakespeare’s appearance, saying “could he but have drawn his wit / As well in brass, as he hath hit / His face; the print would then surpass / All, that was ever writ in brass.” And his memorial verse, which is called “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare,” he heaps extravagant praise on his friend. And in perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence to identify Shakespeare the playwright and poet with the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, Jonson calls him “Sweet Swan of Avon,” comparing the performances of his plays at the riverside theater, the Globe, with the flights of these birds on the Thames, and finally to the Bard’s final “flight from hence.” It is an astonishing and touching piece of evidence proving that, after all, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, and the only way for anti-Stratfordians to contend with it is to splutter that Ben Jonson too must have been in on the cover-up!

Here at the end of our study we should make one thing very clear. The study of Shakespeare’s plays, and who should rightly be credited as their author, is not in and of itself a ridiculous or not worthwhile scholarly pursuit. In fact, there is a long history of legitimate scholarship pertaining to Shakespeare scholarship. Determining which plays were compositions of Shakespeare’s despite having been published anonymously was long a legitimate academic undertaking, as has been searching for evidence of lost works and evidence of source plays that were rewritten as the plays we now recognize, like Love’s Labour’s Won, which appears to have been reworked as All’s Well that Ends Well. During the 18th century, several plays were attributed to him, such as A Yorkshire Tragedy, Sir John Oldcastle, Pericles, and Thomas, Lord Cromwell, all of which would later be disputed as misattributed. Because of this, furthering the parallels between devotion to Shakespeare and religion, we have come to refer to the Shakespearian canon, and everything excluded from it as apocrypha. And much great scholarship has appeared that studies Shakespeare’s collaborative writing. As mentioned in Part One, ever since the emergence of documentation that London playwrights regularly collaborated on their plays, there has emerged an entire field of study on Shakespeare’s collaborations, such that now it is widely accepted that he contributed to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Edward III, and Anthony Munday’s Sir Thomas More, that Titus Andronicus was Shakespeare’s revision of a work by George Peele, and that Henry the Sixth was his revision of a play by Thomas Nashe. What sets this work apart from so-called “authorship studies” is that they do not reject consensus scholarship but rather build on it, in an empirical sense. What anti-Stratfordians do is less like empirical historical study and more akin to historical negationism or denialism. If we look at scholarly definitions of denialism, we see a few criteria. It relies on fake experts, and the fact that Shakespeare authorship claims are almost universally raised by amateur researchers meets this criterion. It is selective in its use of evidence, and relies on outlier evidence, and misrepresents facts, and I think we’ve seen that throughout this series. It resorts to impossible expectations of evidence, which I think is true of anti-Stratfordians as well, as one critic in the New Yorker pointed out that they use “an interpretive framework that has an infinite capacity to explain away information.” And most importantly, denialists always fall back on unsupported claims of widespread conspiracy, and we see that here unmistakably. So let’s lose the terminology that has developed around this topic; let us not speak of Stratfordians and anti-Stratfordians, of Baconians, Marlovians, and Oxfordians. Let’s call them what they are: Shakespeare denialists.

"An Idle and Most False Imposition"; The Shakespeare Authorship Question - Part Four: "The Truth Will Out"

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