The Many Shakespeares

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Due to the lack of explicit physical evidence linking the plays to one of the claimants, any theories based solely on external clues rest on a weak foundation. The theorists have, therefore, turned to the plays themselves in an effort to discover evidence of the true author’s identity. The proponents of each of the major candidates have found passages that are allegedly clues to the writer’s identity, either unconsciously left behind by the author, or deliberately planted in the texts so that scholars of a later age could penetrate his secret and give him proper credit.

The most exotic of these internal clues are the supposed Baconian ciphers. Originally formulated by Ignatius Donnelly, this theory holds that Bacon, while unable to reveal himself during his own lifetime, put coded messages into his published works to ensure that future generations would honour him. Other Baconians have expanded on Donnelly’s ideas and by applying their theories have extracted such hidden messages as ‘Shak’st spur never writ a word of them’ and ‘These plays, the offspring of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world.’

Conclusive as these results might seem, the professional cryptologists W. F. and E. S. Friedman published an exhaustive analysis of the Baconian ciphers in 1957, which demonstrated that none are valid. Even a quick check reveals that at least some of the cryptograms simply don’t work, and that the theorists have had to fudge the results in order to get the desired message. Other methods by which Bacon supposedly encoded his messages are so flexible that practically any word or phrase the reader desires can be generated using them.

But while the plays don’t seem to hide secret meanings, they do contain some explicit passages that give theorists reason to doubt that Shaksper could have composed them. These fall into several categories, each demonstrating, according to the theories, that the writer possessed a specialized knowledge in a particular field, such as law, classical literature, courtly etiquette, seamanship, and foreign geography.

Oxfordians tend to emphasize not just the breadth of the author’s technical knowledge, but also his apparently extensive knowledge of Oxford’s life and family. Many passages in the plays seem to recreate episode’s from the Earl’s personal history, of which only Edward de Vere himself could have known.

Some of the suggestive ‘technical’ passages are indeed intriguing, but there is no adequate way to measure their significance. The same lack of information about Shaksper’s life

that first raised the theorists’ doubts makes it impossible to say for sure that he did not acquire even the most unlikely expertise — by working in a law office, or travelling to the Continent with his acting troupe, or consulting reference books on any of the suspicious topics. It is also questionable just how specialized this knowledge really was, because many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries made use of similar details in their own work.

Orthodox Shakespearean scholars have also demonstrated the ambiguity of the textual clues by identifying scenes that arguable could only have been written by someone of common birth, and the Shakespearean scholar H. N. Gibson has identified a number of episodes that seem to mirror Shaksper’s life as closely as other’s match Oxford’s. The fact that such contradictory conclusions can be gleaned from the texts demonstrates that they cannot be relied upon as definitive evidence of authorship.

While many orthodox scholars concede that there is some room for doubt in the record of William Shaksper of Stratford, support for alternate author theories has not yet gone beyond opinions based on interpretations of ambiguous clue and come to rest on evidence of an explicit nature. Until it does, it would be rash to rewrite the history books.

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