8-1Authorship

What is the Authorship Controversy? Prepared by Daniel .T According to [] there are two sides to the argument over the authorship of Shakespeare's works. The Oxfordians who don't believe that Shakespeare, The Glover's Son from Stratford upon Avon, but rather the 17Th earl of Oxford wrote the poems. That is where the names of the groups come from the Stratford man and the Oxford man because that's where the main suspects are from. They would insist that the author might be Francis Bacon Oxfordians; he was a writer and philosopher but he had a different writing style. They might suggest the writer was Christopher Marlowe, a playwright who was supposedly stabbed to death. Maybe he wasn't dead, but in fact still writing poems but under a pseudonym, and some radicals would go even far enough to say it was queen Elisabeth her self writing the plays ( info on suspects from []), but that's why Oxfordians are widely disregarded by scholars of Shakespeare, for their flimsy evidence which tends to be taken out of context distorted, radical, or false. An Oxfordian would argue that Shakespeare is never referenced to in other works as a writer, how he was a Stratford man and thus wouldn't have enough foreign or educational experience to write the plays, and how some of the works he had written didn't have his name. They would go on to say that there were Apparent parallels in the life of the Earl of Essex and hamlet, That the true writer left clues that suggested Shakespeare was a pseudonym. They also have you believe other writers leave clues in their writing that suggests Shakespeare wasn't the true author. There are however, explanations for all the accusations. First off plays weren't considered literature back in the day so he may not have been thought of as a writer and thus he wouldn't have been alluded to as a writer. Second It was easy to hear stories of passerby as to what happened out side of Stratford, also we don't know what he did in the lost years its very possible that he traveled. They say he wasn't smart enough but they think that only because he hadn't had a formal education. He could have learned just as much by attending public lectures or reading literature.Regarding the accusation that his works weren't named, at the time it was common for works not to have names or an author's name.The idea of the parallels between the Earl of Essex and Hamlet are completely based on the earl being referred to by a certain nick name that another character had in hamlet and there is no evidence that the Earl had that nickname. The piece of evidence that Oxfordians think refers to Shakespeare as a pseudonym is in the way he refers to Venus and Adonis as "the first heir to my invention". They thought the quote meant his name was an invention or a pseudonym. Which is why some radical Oxfordians think that Shakespeare didn't exist and that the name was only a a cover for the real author. Shakespeare was actually referring to his work as his child which was very common at the time so the poem or child would be the heir to his invention which was his writing style. Oxfordians believe that when the author John Benson rewrote some Shakespeare in the year 1640. He deliberately replaced the exclamation points with question marks as if to question weather or not Shakespeare wrote his own poems. At the time however, it was common to replace exclamation points with question marks, but Oxfordians maintain that the rewrite was a suggesting that Shakespeare had not written his own work because they looked at another writers work from the same period and found there was only one instance where the exclamation was interchangeable (info from []). The authorship controversy will most likely remain a heated topic of debate for a long time do to the strong feelings of the people on either side of the argument.

Work cited: Books: Bryson, Bill. //Shakespeare//. 2. London: HarperCollins Publisher, 2008.

Web: Pressley, "The Authorship Debate." //bardweb.net//. February 18, 2009. 8 Apr 2009 [|[[http://www.bardweb.net/debates.htmlhttp://shakespeareauthorship.com/|http://www.bardweb.net/debates.html]]]

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