The Man Who Would Be Shakespeare

by ~habsul-rignyr

This essay appears in Issue 2 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Your mock’d Eie

Certain currents in the social milieu have conspired to make the Shakespeare Authorship Question relevant again. First is the advocacy of political theorist Curtis Yarvin. The other—more germane to a little history of The Question—is the work of historian and biographer Alexander Waugh. To Mr. Waugh’s latest work we shall at length return. Let us begin with a note on terminology.

Oxfordians is the name given to people who subscribe to the belief that the author of Shakespeare’s plays was not a man from Stratford, but rather Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, Viscount Bulbeck and Lord High Chancellor of England. Those who believe Shakespeare to have been the man from Stratford are called Stratfordians by everyone but themselves; this is always and everywhere the prerogative of those who occupy the majority position. There are also Baconians, for those who believe Shakespeare to have been Sir Francis Bacon. Other candidates include Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Edward Dyers, Roger Manners, fifth Earl of Rutland, and many more. I am not sure what these advocates call themselves, though Dyerists seems unlikely and Mannerists is taken. In any event, the collective term for anyone who does not believe in the Stratford man is anti-Stratfordian. Anti-Stratfordians tend to refer to the historical person who was indeed born in Stratford as Shaksper.