Hold on. There are perfectly valid non-classist arguments about Shakespeare’s authorship that don’t come anywhere close to the birther/truther/trigger/deather idiocies.

I have my doubts about the Shakespeare theories but some of them are plausible; they certainly rise to the level of valid questions, even if they don’t disprove his authorship in any dispositive way.

Mark Twain didn’t base his skepticism on incredulity that some yokel from the sticks could create culture, for obvious reasons. Instead he based his skepticism on perceived inconsistencies with his own (vast) knowledge of the life course of such a person and on the apparent lack of any contemporary significant Shakesperean reputation in Stratford, which he contrasted to his own absolute lionization and fetishization in Hannibal. There are also questions raised by Shakespeare’s will, which among other oddities does not dispose of any books, writings, or manuscripts - a rather odd lacunae for the greatest figure in Western letters.

The Shakespeare authorship question would be akin to Birtherism if (for example) there were NO records of births in Hawaii at the time (creating a real lacunae of verifiable information) or if the common (and false) birther trope that “nobody remembers him at these colleges” were actually true. Instead, birtherism is just an increasingly silly set of race-based evasions of fact, with every piece of new hard data assumed as a fabrication by adherents of the theory. “Shakespeare scholars” are hostile to the authorship controversy for the very reasonable reason that they don’t want their literary discipline transformed into a historical whodunit mystery, but that understandable reluctance to go Full Conspiracy Theory mode isn’t itself evidence against the conspiracy.

Twain’s book about the subject is pretty hilarious reading no matter what you believe about the authorship question, btw: http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/TwaDead.html

The connection between Birtherism and the Shakespeare authorship conspiracy theories is an interesting one. It’s true that a lot of the basis of the Shakespeare conspiracy theories is classism. For a traditionally stratified society like England, it’s not too surprising. During Shakespeare’s own life, when he was a playwright for a theatre company, the aristocracy was happy to be entertained by him. But when he rose from any old playwright to a literary icon, the fact that he was a commoner has to have ruffled some feathers among the upper classes.

While we do have more evidence of his childhood in Stratford than some people claim, the general lack of comprehensive historical records for a 16th century commoner isn’t entirely surprising. The Shakespeare authorship conspiracy theories always struck me as a little bit absurd. They remind me of an old joke about how the Iliad wasn’t written by Homer, but by another man of that name.

Amanda, did you ever get around to reading The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde? (I know I’ve plugged it before on this blog). I loved his take on that.

Amanda’s right.

One thing to understand about Barderism is that the greatest named author of English literature (we don’t know who wrote Beowulf) of all time up to the reign of Elizabeth I was clearly Geoffrey Chaucer, who was every bit the aristocrat and conformed to everyone’s prejudices and stereotypes. And while we know less about Sir Thomas Mallory, who was probably number two on the list, we know he was bilingual (French and English) and historians assume this means he was born to privilege.

So an accomplished author of Shakespeare’s common status certainly was a novelty during that period.

My point being that I think that the Barders have something of an excuse that the Birthers lack. We have so many examples of successful and intelligent black Americans that one would have to be an unredeemed bigot to miss that.

Oh for goodness sakes. Here’s a good roundup of the fairly abundant evidence that Shakespeare was Shakespeare:

http://shakespeareauthorship.com/howdowe.html

I think in addition to a classist element, there’s also just an iconoclastic urge to try to blow holes in any received knowledge associated with something about which many people hold great reverence. This ranges from a healthy questioning of authorities - literary, political, and otherwise - to a knee-jerk and ultimately destructive thrill at skepticism for skepticism’s sake. It’s not just that Obama is an African-American president; it’s also all of the “hope” rah rah rah and the idealism and the wide-eyed, excited energy associated with him that was on full display in 2008. That tripped people’s wires and pushed them in the direction of Just Asking Questions.

And the Just Asking Questions phenomenon is on full display in this authorship debate, too. Also the “scholars who disagree with me are doing so purely out of self interest” argument, which has never made the least bit of sense to me, but which you see, for example, in certain paranoid theories about global warming scientists. A scholar who felt she or he could show real proof that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare would wind up being an academic rockstar. That no one has done so says more about their desire to adhere to some standards of truth than an implicit conspiracy amongst academics to deny the Barders a place in the debate.

I prefer Shaw’s version of Shakespear the best, as someone who is egotistical and always in a poetic mode:

THE MAN [detaching a tablet] My friend: present this tablet, and you will be welcomed at any time when the plays of Will Shakespear are in hand. Bring your wife. Bring your friends. Bring the whole garrison. There is ever plenty of room.

THE BEEFEATER. I care not for these new-fangled plays. No man can understand a word of them. They are all talk. Will you not give me a pass for The Spanish Tragedy?

THE MAN. To see The Spanish Tragedy one pays, my friend. Here are the means. [He gives him a piece of gold].

I suggest that Shakespear missed this questionable advantage, not because he was socially too low to have attained to it, but because he conceived himself as belonging to the upper class from which our public school boys are now drawn. Let Mr Harris survey for a moment the field of contemporary journalism. He will see there some men who have the very characteristics from which he infers that Shakespear was at a social disadvantage through his lack of middle-class training. They are rowdy, ill-mannered, abusive, mischievous, fond of quoting obscene schoolboy anecdotes, adepts in that sort of blackmail which consists in mercilessly libelling and insulting every writer whose opinions are sufficiently heterodox to make it almost impossible for him to risk perhaps five years of a slender income by an appeal to a prejudiced orthodox jury; and they see nothing in all this cruel blackguardism but an uproariously jolly rag, although they are by no means without genuine literary ability, a love of letters, and even some artistic conscience. But he will find not one of the models of his type (I say nothing of mere imitators of it) below the rank that looks at the middle class, not humbly and enviously from below, but insolently from above. Mr Harris himself notes Shakespear’s contempt for the tradesman and mechanic, and his incorrigible addiction to smutty jokes. He does us the public service of sweeping away the familiar plea of the Bardolatrous ignoramus, that Shakespear’s coarseness was part of the manners of his time, putting his pen with precision on the one name, Spenser, that is necessary to expose such a libel on Elizabethan decency. There was nothing whatever to prevent Shakespear from being as decent as More was before him, or Bunyan after him, and as self-respecting as Raleigh or Sidney, except the tradition of his class, in which education or statesmanship may no doubt be acquired by those who have a turn for them, but in which insolence, derision, profligacy, obscene jesting, debt contracting, and rowdy mischievousness, give continual scandal to the pious, serious, industrious, solvent bourgeois. . No other class is infatuated enough to believe that gentlemen are born and not made by a very elaborate process of culture. Even kings are taught and coached and drilled from their earliest boyhood to play their part. But the man of family (I am convinced that Shakespear took that view of himself) will plunge into society without a lesson in table manners, into politics without a lesson in history, into the city without a lesson in business, and into the army without a lesson in honor.

It has been said, with the object of proving Shakespear a laborer, that he could hardly write his name. Why? Because he “had not the advantage of a middle-class training.” Shakespear himself tells us, through Hamlet, that gentlemen purposely wrote badly lest they should be mistaken for scriveners; but most of them, then as now, wrote badly because they could not write any better. In short, the whole range of Shakespear’s foibles: the snobbishness, the naughtiness, the contempt for tradesmen and mechanics, the assumption that witty conversation can only mean smutty conversation, the flunkeyism towards social superiors and insolence towards social inferiors, the easy ways with servants which is seen not only between The Two Gentlemen of Verona and their valets, but in the affection and respect inspired by a great servant like Adam: all these are the characteristics of Eton and Harrow, not of the public elementary or private adventure school. They prove, as everything we know about Shakespear suggests, that he thought of the Shakespears and Ardens as families of consequence, and regarded himself as a gentleman under a cloud through his father’s ill luck in business, and never for a moment as a man of the people. This is at once the explanation of and excuse for his snobbery. He was not a parvenu trying to cover his humble origin with a purchased coat of arms: he was a gentleman resuming what he conceived to be his natural position as soon as he gained the means to keep it up.

http://drama.eserver.org/plays/modern/dark-lady-of-the-sonnets/preface.html/document_view

William Shakespeare did not exist. His plays were masterminded in 1589 by Francis Bacon, who used a Ouija board to enslave playwriting ghosts. /Portal2

And I thought it was Colin Firth who wrote all of Shakespeare’s stuff…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM-Y1ch4b5c

It was pretty strange hearing that John Paul Stevens entertained detailed Barder theories.

mfb, according to the Wiki, it has engaged some of the best-known literary/creative minds of the last century:

Some prominent public figures, including Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, have found the arguments against Shakespeare’s authorship persuasive, and their endorsements are an important element in many anti-Stratfordian arguments.[17]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question

In the wake of all the outlandish conspiracy theories I’ve been exposed to involving almost any big/important/controversial event that happened over the last 100+ years , I’ve come to the conclusion that for some people the more detail you collect on an event, the more anomalies, coincidences, statistically rare occurrences will pile up — all of which serve to take things that might otherwise be perfectly innocent, if tragic, and place them in a shadow of secrecy and conspiracy for those so inclined to see them that way.

The assassination of JFK is the quintessential example of this sort of thing.  And a prejudice is involved, just as with Shakespeare and Obama.  A lot of people just cannot grasp that some two-bit loser like Oswald could work out and “execute” a plan to take out Kennedy.  So in the minds of some, the only purely innocent person involved in the killing of JFK is the killer.  Ironically…

I don’t get why that’s important (the prominent public figures thing, I mean). The wikipedia article only says that they are an important part of anti-Stratfordian arguments (which means arguments against the idea that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, for those who don’t follow this debate). It doesn’t say why we anyone finds the opinions of some writers, activists, psychoanalysts, actors, and directors persuasive in the face of the historical record.

@genesic: At least he wasn’t a potato.

This is not quite the same thing, but Barderism reminds me a little of the people who don’t believe that the Egyptians could have built the pyramids without the aid of extraterrestrials.

I’ll take the counterproposition: birtherism is clearly ludicrous, but if they were right, it’d be kind of a big deal.  I abstain on how ludicrous Bardism is, though I think the arguments are odd and unconvincing to the extent I’ve looked (not much), but if it were true that someone other than Shakespeare wrote those plays ... so what?  About the only important and interesting thing about Shakespeare is that he wrote Shakespeare, and if it turns out some disaffected noble wrote Shakespeare instead, the only important and interesting thing about *that* person would be that he wrote Shakespeare.  (I guess there are a few candidates - Francis Bacon! - of whom this isn’t quite true.)  It reminds me of my college professor’s joke that it was recently discovered The Iliad wasn’t written by Homer, but rather by some other Greek fellow, also named Homer.

”...Barderism reminds me a little of the people who don’t believe that the Egyptians could have built the pyramids without the aid of extraterrestrials.”

Yup.  They just can’t conceive that a bunch of Copper Age brown people living in the desert could possibly be organized by the thousands to quarry, move, and place thousands of stones weighing many tons each, and accurately produce not just one, buy many pyramids.

I have one retort: Get over it.

People in the past were every bit as smart as people are now, they just had less accumulated technical knowledge and understanding.  They made up for this by understanding that one man is weak, but many men can be a strong as needed to accomplish incredible feats, something that our Galtian Overlords seem to have forgotten…

In my youth, I read a lot about Barderism as a part of an overall interest in “unsolved mysteries” and whatnot. What I found interesting was that most of Shakespeare’s plays’ plots come from pre-existing sources. That is, our sources of fiction or fiction-like literature (the line’s a little blurry back in the day). Secondly, the idea that some luminary of the time wrote all these plays, which were fairly popular during their respective runs and made plenty of cash, yet refused for some reason or another to claim credit - Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon - is relatively recent. It first came to popularity in the latter half of the 19th century. I can’t recall the exact details, but it sort of resembles much of the booshwah that was popular amongst the whackerati of the 1800s - civilizations beneath the Earth’s surface, Atlantis as seen by theosophy, premillennialism - basically, some dude pulled the idea basically out of his ass and ran with it, notational standards of the time being significantly lower.

”...Barderism reminds me a little of the people who don’t believe that the Egyptians could have built the pyramids without the aid of extraterrestrials.”

My brother’s take on such people (or those that think aliens built Stonehenge because why would ancient Britons haul giant fuck-off rocks 200 miles): “Well, of course Egyptians built the pyramids by themselves. What else were they going to do? It’s not like they had six hours of TV to catch up on every night.”

Yup.  They just can’t conceive that a bunch of Copper Age brown people living in the desert could possibly be organized by the thousands to quarry, move, and place thousands of stones weighing many tons each, and accurately produce not just one, buy many pyramids.

And continuing this train of thought even further, I’ve often felt that there’s an element of racism behind the 9/11 truther theories. Underlying all of their “investigation” I always sense a strain of “no way a bunch of brown fundies living in tents in the desert could pull off an attack against the mighty AMURICA.” It seems like there’s often some ugly prejudices hiding under the surface of conspiracy theories.

I always saw the whole who was Shakespeare thing as a bit of goofy academic fun. Something you debate because everyone enjoys a bit of mystery like Masonic influences or is the Louvre’s painting the real Mona Lisa. In the end does it really matter if Bacon wrote Hamlet? Aside from a few textbooks what would change? Actual, existing conspiracies are usually pretty mundane so I judge new ones by that standard of dullness. A faked birth certificate isn’t that exciting so yeah, maybe… but beyond a simple violation of the law, what would be the significance? Obama has lived here most of his life, he is a product of our schools and culture, he has served our country as a citizen and accomplished statesman giving no reason to doubt his loyalty or interests. It’s doesn’t get nefarious until you make the leap that somehow not falling out of his mother onto a patch of US soil makes Obama weak to anti-US sentiments which he held onto since infancy playing the longest of long games until he was finally in a place to destroy the country from it’s highest office. Doesn’t that sentence just beg for a “as the Illuminati had planned” at the end?

People in the past were every bit as smart as people are now, they just had less accumulated technical knowledge and understanding.  They made up for this by understanding that one man is weak, but many men can be a strong as needed to accomplish incredible feats, something that our Galtian Overlords seem to have forgotten…

I don’t think any more highly of Ayn Rand types than you do, but I would say that this is a terrible example to criticize them with. After all, the Egyptians used SLAVE LABOR to build the pyramids. You don’t have to be a fire-breathing opponent of collectivism to think that this was more than unfortunate and that the beauty of the accomplishment does not justify the brutal means used to produce it.

And by the way, I just realized this, but Dara Lind, not Adam Serwer, wrote the original blog post that Amanda cites in her OP. Credit where credit is due.

Indeed, I have done extensive historical research that shows conclusively that Serwer COULDN’T have written it. (Just kidding—I looked at the byline. )

“the conspiracy theory that there are “questions” about Shakespeare being the man who wrote Shakespeare’s plays.”

Shakespeare was black?

Triplanetary:

Exactly. Racism and classism are common features in conspiracy theories.

There’s another thing though—one thing I’ve recently realized about tinfoil hat theories is that they’re almost always intellectual Ponzi schemes. What I mean by that is that in most such theories, the number of people who must be at least somewhat clued into the conspiracy grows out of control the more you think about it. (Among other things, that’s how the Satanic Panic got going.)

@#18 - THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.  I was an English major in college and the whole “controversy” about Shakespeare writing his plays makes me nuts.  There is NO credible evidence of any sort that anyone but William Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays, and plenty of evidence that the people who originally promulgated this idea (like Delia Bacon and Ignatius Donnelly, who also believed in Atlantis) were at best misguided and at worst insane (literally, in Bacon’s case - she died in an asylum).

Anyone who wants to know more is directed to S. Schoenbaum’s “Shakespeare’s Lives.”  Seriously.

After all, the Egyptians used SLAVE LABOR to build the pyramids.

This is one of those bits of conventional wisdom that isn’t entirely, you know, true. The Egyptians did keep slaves, of course, like most any ancient militaristic culture. But they didn’t put slaves to the wide variety of uses that the ancient Romans did. Mostly for domestic functions, which isn’t to say they were at all nice to their slaves.

Long story short, every able-bodied lower-class male citizen of ancient Egypt was required to do a certain amount of physical labor for the Pharaoh every year. For the most part, that’s the labor that built the pyramids.

(The common myth about ancient Hebrews building the pyramids is simply an extrapolation from Exodus, which never mentions pyramids.)

#26:

Actually corvee labor was used to build the pyramids, which means that only members of the lower classes had to work, and it was unpaid labor. It was a form of chattel slavery and would definitely fit under any modern definition of slave labor (including, for instance, the ILO Forced Labor Convention).

It doesn’t say why we anyone finds the opinions of some writers, activists, psychoanalysts, actors, and directors persuasive in the face of the historical record.

That’s because we are more likely to believe in a genius coming sui generis from the people today then back then.

What, aside from international fame, did Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles have in common? The answer is that they all believed that the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare were really written by someone else. The first three belong to the classic “Baconian” era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the claims of Sir Francis Bacon’s authorship were uppermost; and were argued most vociferously in America. Freud and Welles were more modern “Oxfordians”, believing the true author to be Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as first proposed by J. Thomas Looney in 1920. Chaplin was a floating voter, a generic “anti-Stratfordian”. He did not know who wrote the plays, he explained in his 1964 autobiography, “but I can hardly think it was the boy from Stratford. Whoever wrote them had an aristocratic attitude”.

These are essentially celebrity endorsements: none of the above, with the possible exception of Freud, could be called a Shakespeare scholar. It is an impressive list but also a very elderly one. One could continue it through to the present day (Malcolm X, Enoch Powell, Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance, Jim Jarmusch . . .), but those early big names look back to the heyday of the authorship controversy, when the anti-Stratfordian cause seemed daring and even excitingly modern in its challenge to traditional (and, from the American point of view, to English) orthodoxy.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/tls_selections/literature_and_criticism/article7103578.ece

I can only add that I’m a big Orson Welles fanboy, but I would not be persuaded by his view on Shakespeare because intellect wasn’t his big thing, sounding intellectual was his bag.

Thanks for the link and explanation. Celebrity endorsements! Awesome.

What set Shakespeare apart from the other candidates is that he alone spent years in the acting business. How better to learn how to write plays than by acting in them and by fixing up other playwrights’ texts? After all, they didn’t teach theater in universities back then.

Marlowe did attend university. His learning is evident in his plays and is not to their advantage.

Tombs of the pyramid builders

In 1990, tombs belonging to the pyramid workers were discovered alongside the pyramids with an additional burial site found nearby in 2009. Although not mummified they had been buried in mud-brick tombs with beer and bread to support them in the afterlife. The tombs’ proximity to the pyramids and manner of burial supports that they were paid laborers who took great pride in their work and were not slaves, as was previously thought. The myth of slaves building the pyramids was popularized by Hollywood films based on the belief that they could not have been built without forced labor. Evidence from the tombs indicates that a workforce of 10,000 laborers working in three month shifts took around 30 years to build a pyramid. Most of the workers appear to have been from poor families. Farms supplied the laborers with 21 cattle and 23 sheep daily. Specialists such as architects, masons, metalworkers and carpenters, were permanently employed by the king to fill positions that required the most skill.[17][18][19][20][21]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramids_of_Giza#Tombs_of_the_pyramid_builders

Mark Twain, of all people, jumped on the Shakespeare-wasn’t-Shakespeare theory, saying he couldn’t have written those plays because he was uneducated. This is richly ironic coming from Twain, who never went to high school.

Bardism really is classism and to anybody who thinks a relatively low-born man (or woman) couldn’t learn to write soaring words that exalt the spirit, (amongst other things, obviously) I have just two words for you: Abraham. Lincoln.  Third Grade education, if that, really. And this is what it produced, amongst other minor accomplishments you might have heard of:

Dear Madam,—

A. Lincoln

#27: There are records that show working on the monumental structures of ancient Egypt was a way to earn extra food during the year, so it wasn’t unpaid.  That was probably part of the point: provide some incentive to keep peasants busy in the non-farming season so they didn’t get bored and string you up.

Also, “chattel” slavery involves owning the slave as property - unless the Pharaoh personally owned every person in Egypt, it was not chattel slavery as defined by anyone.

@33: Yeah, Lincoln was a pretty smart guy. The Gettysburg Address is the only words he wrote that most people study, but he also wrote detective fiction (of varying quality, admittedly). Given that he only had, as you said, a third-grade education, he comes across as someone whose skill with language comes from just reading a lot. It was likely the case with Shakespeare as well, given how many of his plots have been identified as being inspired by books contemporary to his time.

@34: That’s nothing more than the equally-unreasonable flipside to the conspiracy theory mindset. “The official story is always right and there are never organized groups of hidden malefactors” is equally unreasonable as “anyone who denies the conspiracy is probably in on the conspiracy.” Things like MK ULTRA and the Tuskegee project really did happen; it was the people who dismissed them as impossible conspiracy theories who turned out to be wrong.

This is a strawman. Refusing to believe a conspiracy theory until sufficient proof is compiled is called burden of proof. The fact that MK ULTRA turned out to be a real thing doesn’t mean the skeptics were wrong; their whole point was that there wasn’t sufficient proof for it. And then there was. “Lol you have to keep your mind open to everything” seems like a reasonable position to some, but only because they don’t actually know what skepticism is.

@35: There are records that show working on the monumental structures of ancient Egypt was a way to earn extra food during the year, so it wasn’t unpaid.  That was probably part of the point: provide some incentive to keep peasants busy in the non-farming season so they didn’t get bored and string you up.

Indeed. The ancient Egyptian government levied taxes in the form of crops, and it actually paid government workers in food. It’s not certain that they paid manual laborers this way, but there’s evidence that they did.

I firmly believe that Shakespeare authored most of his plays—though I do know of scenes that have been disputed and plays that were co-authored. And I wish he were around to explain what goes on with Two Noble Kinsmen.  That being said, I don’t buy into the Bacon theories.

I wasted an hour on youtube debating a birther—every fact he brought up I disputed and it didn’t matter. I could put him in a TARDIS (if I had one), and take him to Hawaii to witness the birth and he wouldn’t believe it. There is no reasoning with a birther.

Plenty on the use of corvee labor to build the pyramids here:

http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&safe=off&source=hp&q=pyramids+corvee+labor&aq=f&aqi;=&aql;=&oq;=&pbx=1&fp=5068b48774b6de5d

The fact that MK ULTRA turned out to be a real thing doesn’t mean the skeptics were wrong; their whole point was that there wasn’t sufficient proof for it.

No, their point was that it was inconceivable that our government would act in that fashion, so the burden of proof needed to be incredibly high.  That point was false.

I recently started reading into the Barderism controversy, the first book I read was a historiography of the controversy.  During a 19th century fascination with ciphers, people were trying to prove that Francis Bacon not only wrote the plays but hid messages in the texts which could be deciphered. 

Twain and others believe that truly great writing can only be produced from one’s own experiences.  Therefore, the true author must have had experiences similar to those depicted in the plays.  Add that to the need for an aristocratic education and a connection to the royal court and the search landed on Edward de Vere,  17th Earl of Oxford.  This fellow apparently did have some experiences similar to episodes in the plays, like being kidnapped by pirates and left ashore without clothes, a la Hamlet, and living in Venice while running up debts to moneylenders there, a la Merchant of Venice.  De Vere wrote plays in his own name.  Why he would have hidden his authorship of the canon is not well explained by the Oxfordians.  One of them is his having secretly fathered a child with Elizabeth I. 

The Oxfordian version began gaining traction again as conspiracy theories on just about anything, but most remarkably on the JFK assassination, began to become more popular.  Your analogy to the birtherism baloney is right on, Amanda.

Third Grade education, if that, really.

He was an autodiadactic, and not just in the Law:

With the assistance of another friend, Lincoln was appointed as an assistant to county surveyor John Calhoun, a Democratic political appointee. Lincoln had no experience at surveying, but relying on borrowed copies of two works was able to teach himself the practical application of surveying techniques as well as the trigonometric basis of the process.

..........................................................................................

Stuart (who was the cousin of Lincoln’s future wife Mary Todd) was impressed with Lincoln and encouraged him to study law.[24] Lincoln was probably familiar with courtrooms from an early age. While the family was still in Kentucky his father was frequently involved with filing deeds, serving on juries, and attending sheriff’s sales, and Lincoln was likely aware of his father’s legal issues. When the family moved to Indiana, Lincoln lived within 15 miles (24 km) of three different county courthouses and, attracted by the opportunity of hearing a good oral presentation, Lincoln, like many other people on the frontier, attended court sessions as a spectator. This practice continued when Lincoln moved to New Salem in Illinois.[25] Noticing how often lawyers referred to them, Lincoln made a point of reading and studying the Revised Statutes of Indiana, the Declaration of Independence, and the United States Constitution.[26] In the first half of 1835, frequently using law books borrowed from the firm of Stuart and Drummond, Lincoln began the study of law in earnest.[27]

In March 1836 Lincoln took the first step to becoming a practicing attorney when he applied to the clerk of the Sangamon County Court to have himself registered as a man of good and moral character. After passing an oral examination by a panel of practicing attorneys Lincoln received his law license on September 9, 1836 and in April 1837 he was enrolled to practice before the Supreme Court of Illinois. In April 1837 he moved to Springfield where he went into partnership with Stuart.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_and_career_of_Abraham_Lincoln#Lincoln_settles_in

The historiographical book to which I referred above is “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” by Columbia Professor James Shapiro, published in 2010.

MaL, the link @28 goes to a London Times review of that work.

@32 - That’s not what Twain said.

Twain said that Shakespeare didn’t have TIME to do all the things that he would have (presumably) had to do in order to be an autodidact, not that autodidacticism wasn’t possible for someone low-born. Look, there’s definitely some class thinking in much of the Barderist thinking, but that brush isn’t the whole painting.

If Twain had said what you think he said, that would indeed be ironic.

It was in fact his very close commonality with Shakespeare, in terms of origin story and career arc, that prompted him to question the official version. That, and the doggerel on Shakespeare’s grave really niggled at his sense of artistic consistency. (It does mine, too.)

I quite agree that there is no evidence that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the corpus. I also quite agree with the skeptics that there are interesting, if not unresolvable, questions about how he could have done so.

My understanding of ancient Egyptian culture is that the common caste was, for all intents and purposes, owned by the state,  that that’s how they viewed themselves, and that’s how the society worked.  Maybe it was a form of chattel slavery, but the commoners from my understanding viewed themselves more in the light of a child and the Pharaoh as the father.  I could be completely wrong about all this.

When I was studying Lit back in the 80s, there were two strains of Barderism.  One is as described by Amanda here. 
The other was that while Shakespeare was the scribe he was not necessarily the author.  The authorship was then further divided into recording the work of his troupe as an ensemble, a recording of refined and/or established works, etc.  I actually feel that the first option of the second type is perfectly plausable, no more likely or unlikely than Shakespeare having written the plays attributed to him.
The whole is frankly immaterial.  They do draw heavily on earlier works, but as far as I’ve seen with definate changes.

Actually, it’s fairly clear that Shakespeare wasn’t particularly well-educated. The only classical work to which he refers is Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_. An aristocrat very likely would have referred to numerous other works of classical antiquity. If you compare Shakespeare to someone well-educated, John Milton for example (who was eight-years old when Shakespeare died), you can easily observe the difference in their respective levels of classical knowledge. Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone who was doing the Early Modern equivalent of “slumming.”
Shakespeare continues to ring true because he was the first writer in the English language to understand the importance of psychological realism. The people in his plays behave, on the whole, in a logically consistent manner. You didn’t need a good education to understand that people wanted entertainment that appeared as if it could have been cut from their own lives. This was an entirely commercial decision, as it would have made his work accessible to a very broad cross-section of the social strata.
Shakespeare was trying to write plays that were appealing to his audience. He was the Michael Bay of the Elizabethan era (sans blowing shit up, and with a better screenplay).

Aaaaand, the first defender of the theory is one of our resident wingnuts. Way to prove the point, Alk.

What Barders have never managed to explain is the same as what all conspiracy theorists have never to explain, which is how you get hundreds of people in on it.  To hear Barders think, you’‘d think that Shakespeare was Emily Dickinson, scribbbling away in an attic.  But in fact, he was a well-know playwright in his life.  He was literally the Spielberg of his time.  Believing he wasn’t himself is like believing there’s an elaborate conspiracy to hide the fact that there’s a Christian writing and directing all of Spielberg’s movies, and they’re only putting a Jewish face on it for reasons unknown.

I always saw the whole who was Shakespeare thing as a bit of goofy academic fun.

Which goes to show how classist “goofy academic fun” traditionally is.  Barderism isn’t very goofy or fun for people who encounter it who have worked their way up the food chain to go to college.  It’s not fun or goofy for people who are the first in their family to go to college or who have class or ethnic markers that put them as outsiders.  What’s way more “fun” is encountering the real history of geniuses like Shakespeare, who didn’t need arbitrary social class distinctions to be brilliant.

Exactly, Amanda, and while there were plenty of political conspiracies at the time, I don’t think there was even a POV that would be necessary to be behind a “Literary Conspiracy”.

Contemporary testimony

Both explicit testimony by his contemporaries and strong circumstantial evidence of personal relationships with those who interacted with him as an actor and playwright support Shakespeare’s authorship. Playwright and poet Ben Jonson knew Shakespeare from at least 1598, when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed Jonson’s play Every Man in His Humour at the Curtain Theatre with Shakespeare as a cast member. Scottish poet William Drummond recorded Jonson’s often contentious comments about his contemporaries: Jonson criticised Shakespeare as lacking “arte” and for mistakenly giving Bohemia a coast in The Winter’s Tale.[83] In 1641, four years after Jonson’s death, private notes written during his later life were published. In a comment intended for posterity (Timber or Discoveries), he criticises Shakespeare’s casual approach to playwriting, but praises Shakespeare as a person: “I loved the man, and do honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any. He was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature; had an excellent fancy; brave notions, and gentle expressions. . .”[84]

Actors John Heminges and Henry Condell knew and worked with Shakespeare for more than 20 years. In the 1623 First Folio, they wrote that they had published the Folio “onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow aliue, as was our Shakespeare, by humble offer of his playes”. Historian and antiquary Sir George Buc served as Deputy Master of the Revels from 1603 and as Master of the Revels from 1610 to 1622. His duties were to supervise and censor plays for the public theatres, arrange court performances of plays, and, after 1606, to license plays for publication. Buc noted on the title page of George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (1599), an anonymous play, that he had consulted Shakespeare on its authorship. Buc was meticulous in his efforts to attribute books and plays to the correct author, and in 1607 he personally licensed King Lear for publication as written by “Master William Shakespeare”.[85]

Shakespeare was trying to write plays that were appealing to his audience. He was the Michael Bay of the Elizabethan era (sans blowing shit up, and with a better screenplay).

IIRC he actually had the Elizabethan equivalent to “blowing shit up” which was to have gimmicks like live animals on stage and pig bladders full of blood and guts that could get stabbed during sword fights and spill out for the audience to see.

Still the comparison to Michael Bay is harsh.  William Shakespeare’s Transformers would probably be an amazing thing to see staged…

“Still the comparison to Michael Bay is harsh.”

Culturally, not artistically

Although direct classical education by tutors or at university (also by tutors)  may have largely been limited largely to the aristocracy, Barders also have the problem (as birthers do in a slightly different way) that the overwhelming majority of the aristocracy took pride in being dumb as bricks, and having entirely skipped the educational side of their university careers in favor of drinking, gambling and wenching. (The status of of the supposedly great universities as upperclass warehouses persisted well into this century on both side of the pond—a relative who attended oxford in the 30s complained that required meetings with his faculty advisor made a serious dent in his tennis schedule.)

Which goes to show how classist “goofy academic fun” traditionally is.  Barderism isn’t very goofy or fun for people who encounter it who have worked their way up the food chain to go to college.  It’s not fun or goofy for people who are the first in their family to go to college or who have class or ethnic markers that put them as outsiders.

Are the classist aspects of Barderism really thrown at the first-to-go-to-college types like that? In my high school Shakespeare class, my patrician English teacher brought up and dismissed the Barderist claims as being silly and classist 19th century snobbery, and we moved on, with a short return to the topic when The Atlantic published a point/counterpoint on the Oxfordian claim.

But the more time you spend talking and thinking about these things, the more you start engaging in goofy games, like inventing the word conundrum or looking for anagrams embedded in texts. But then such things get obsessed about by crazy people or, possibly worse, taken seriously by people who think that this is what you need to believe to be taken seriously an identifying/cultural/social marker (both of which are present in birtherism).

Bill Bryson’s book on Who was Shakespeare is excellent and a quick read.

I don’t think a noble could have written Shakespeare because there are too many well-drawn lower-class characters in his books. to nobility, the lower class was invisible.

Which goes to show how classist “goofy academic fun” traditionally is.  Barderism isn’t very goofy or fun for people who encounter it who have worked their way up the food chain to go to college.  It’s not fun or goofy for people who are the first in their family to go to college or who have class or ethnic markers that put them as outsiders.  What’s way more “fun” is encountering the real history of geniuses like Shakespeare, who didn’t need arbitrary social class distinctions to be brilliant.

Really? Because what I remember about the first gens and the folk working their way through my college is that they sat around and thought about stuff as much of the rest of us. Barderism and it’s ilk are (should be) exercises in critical thinking. Here’s a crazy premise, make your case for or against. Serious proponents get an instant fail for missing the entire point. I know that’s not the case in many circles and there’s a unfortunate group of academics who are happy to keep the “controversy” alive and the paychecks that come with it. That’s all the more reason to keep the exercise around. Here’s some particularly entrenched bullshit, kids; tear it apart.

Sir Issac Newton came from a similar background.  His family were commoners and he received assistance to go to Oxford.  Nobody claims he wasn’t one of the two folks to invent calculus.  I suspect this difference has a lot to do with the fact that in his lifetime, Newton became an extremely wealthy, powerful government official.  Will Shakespeare became a moderately wealthy playwright and theater owner.

Really? Because what I remember about the first gens and the folk working their way through my college is that they sat around and thought about stuff as much of the rest of us.

I don’t think that’s Amanda’s point. I think her point is that the reason the Barderism controversy still gets discussed at all isn’t because a group of academics want their paychecks. It’s similar to the reason Birtherism still hangs around, which is that the notion that a black/lower-class person couldn’t really have achieved those things by merit is till hanging in the air, regardless of whether a majority of people explicitly believe it.

Although direct classical education by tutors or at university (also by tutors)  may have largely been limited largely to the aristocracy, Barders also have the problem (as birthers do in a slightly different way) that the overwhelming majority of the aristocracy took pride in being dumb as bricks, and having entirely skipped the educational side of their university careers in favor of drinking, gambling and wenching. (The status of of the supposedly great universities as upperclass warehouses persisted well into this century on both side of the pond—a relative who attended oxford in the 30s complained that required meetings with his faculty advisor made a serious dent in his tennis schedule.)

Many universities, especially the private ones are still that way to some extent.  The only differences are that 1). It is no longer something to be done with as much pride by most undergrads/university communities and 2). Most students with such attitudes are no longer able to gain easy entry into the elite Ivy-level private universities as in the past…even with legacy status.  Most…. end up at expensive private schools that are a few steps or more below the elite (i.e. GWU, BU, NYU, etc).

Also, I’m not sure that universities even in Shakespeare’s time was an exclusive preserve of the aristocracy.  Even as late as the 19th century, many British and other aristocrats regarded universities as “dens of iniquity” and thought it best to home tutor and to send their kids on a “Grand Tour” trip instead.

Exholt:

Funny you should mention BU—they’re one of the few schools set up specifically to deal with brain-dead legacies. They’ve actually got a two-year on-campus prep school called the College of General Studies; from what I understand (I went to Boston College, though I did take a couple classes through the BU night school) it’s not someplace you want to wind up.

genesic: “In Victorian England, a commoner was not allowed to look directly at the Queen, due to a belief at the time that the poor had the ability to steal thoughts. Science now believes that less than 4% of poor people are able to do this.”

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
—Aristotle

Actually, it’s fairly clear that Shakespeare wasn’t particularly well-educated. The only classical work to which he refers is Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_. An aristocrat very likely would have referred to numerous other works of classical antiquity. If you compare Shakespeare to someone well-educated, John Milton for example (who was eight-years old when Shakespeare died), you can easily observe the difference in their respective levels of classical knowledge. Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone who was doing the Early Modern equivalent of “slumming.”

Exactly.  Shakespeare’s plays draw on the same handful of classical works over and over—mostly Ovid and the Roman histories—and they’re works that were standard reading in Elizabethan grammar schools.  Grade-school education at the time was basically nothing but reading Latin and Greek.  The literary references in the plays suggest someone who had a basic education and read for fun, but hadn’t gone to college.  His knowledge of law isn’t as impressive as anti-Shakespeareans make it out to be, and probably just came from suing people a lot.

I don’t understand Mark Twain’s belief that Shakespeare wouldn’t have had time to become an accomplished writer.  He wasn’t grindingly poor or anything.  His family was very well-off when he was a boy; his father was mayor of Stratford.  The Shakespeares ran into some unknown financial crisis or scandal when William was about twelve, but they were basically a middle-class small-town family.  William went off to London in his early twenties, became established as an actor, then started writing plays on the side.  The earliest reference to Shakespeare by critics is the famous attack on him as an “upstart crow,” a young actor who used his success on the stage to get his own plays produced.  That’s a perfectly plausible timeline.

The Elizabethan era was the first period when it was possible for commoners (male commoners, at least) to succeed in the arts and academics.  Basic education and literacy were available to everyone with a penis and had been for a generation, lower-class boys were admitted into universities on scholarships and patronages, the printing press made books plentiful and easy to publish, and the rise of the middle class created a large group of commoners who had money, education, and free time.  It’s no surprise that many of the great writers of the period came from middle-class backgrounds.

Incidentally, most critics and scholars of the time thought their era would be remembered for its epic poets, like the properly upper-class Edmund Spenser.

In addition to classism, I think people are just disappointed that the beautiful plays and poetry of Shakespeare came from a boring, balding, pudding-faced middle-class suburbanite rather than some romantic aristocrat.  At least Marlowe was a badass gay secret agent.  Speaking of which, there needs to be a TV show about the gay secret-agent adventures of Christopher Marlowe.

Dark Avenger @45, 
Thanks for the extra nudge to read that review.  I had skipped it. 

I just started a biography of de Vere, which I gather from the cover’s subtitle “The Man Who Wrote Shakespeare” and the introduction by Derek Jacobi (a confirmed Oxfordian), is an idolatrous treatment.  In the first 20 pages it presumes the reader knows that de Vere is the true author and the description of events of his early life and his family history are sprinkled with verses from plays to make the autobiographical connection.  The presumption is annoying and of course I expect references to the plays will only be selected which support the presumption.  Already I see an internal contradiction with this book’s suggestion that 16th century child-rearing was markedly not indulgent and that the plays have very little regard for mothers, citing supposedly the only phrase in the canon which uses de Vere’s mother’s name, Margery.  How the biography’s author will reconcile that theory with the supposedly autobiographical Hamlet’s preoccupation with his mother’s sex life will be interesting.  Your referenced review cited a biography less complimentary to de Vere and I’m making a note of it. 

The Shapiro book, as the review points out, spends little space, maybe a chapter, of actual defense of the man from Stratford as the true author (with some collaboration).  Tracing how the authorship challenge grew over time is Shapiro’s fascinating task and description. 

The common trait of current conspiracists and anti-Stratfordians is the process of starting with a premise and cherry picking evidence which supports the premise while ignoring evidence contradicting it.  Or proposing outlandish ways of explaining away contradictory evidence.  For example, the publication of Obama’s birth announcement in Hawaiian newspapers means that subversives were plotting back then to raise a mole or a Damien to inhabit the highest offices in America.

With my college education focused primarily on playing trombone and studying 20th Century History and Computer Science - I have no opinion on this subject - but I did find this article intersting that makes the claim the plays were written by a Amelia Bassano a Jewish woman. 

http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1584

Thanks, fuzzbone for the amusing link.

“Despite the risks, Hudson believes that Bassano signaled her claim to authorship by encoding her name in several plays.” 

Also a claim of Oxfordians, and of the Bacon devotees before them.

Putting on my I Am an Actual Shakespeare Professor hat here to agree with Shaenon.  England went through radical educational reform in the sixteenth century, and Shakespeare’s grade-school education was basically a training ground for writing in verse and making classical allusions.  As for those who claim Shakespeare didn’t have time to write that much—good lord, look at Spenser or Milton or every other Renaissance author who managed to be amazingly prolific while still holding down a day job.  Lope de Vega wrote almost two thousand plays. 

As for Amelia Bassano (better known as Aemilia Lanyer), we don’t even know if she was Jewish.  We do know she wrote some awesome stuff, including the wonderful protofeminist call to arms “Eve’s Apologie” in her poem Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.  But her style isn’t a bit like Shakespeare’s, and her work deserves more attention in its own right.

And putting on my I Am Also A Shakespeare Professor hat (accessorized with a natty Although I Actually Publish On Non-Shakespearean Renaissance Drama tassel), I’ll chime in in support of sherunslunatic, shaenon and Dymphna. We have more evidence for Shakespeare’s literary and dramatic activity than we have for any other playwright of the period, because he was massively successful and connected to an equally successful company.

All the professional playwrights of the period were commoners: writing for money was thought ‘low’ and writing for the theatre was hack work, rather like writing for soap operas. When Thomas Bodley was collecting books for Oxford’s library, he categorized plays as ‘riff-raff’ and refused to give them shelf room, saying ‘only one play in 40’ was worth reading. Aristocrats wrote poetry or closet drama, not plays for public performance; even court dramas and entertainments like masques, were written by professional playwrights.  This changed a bit under Charles I and Henrietta Maria, his queen, because she was French and loved the theatre—so her courtiers wrote plays. But that’s in the 1630s, long after Will’s death. In the 1590’s, when Shakespeare wanted to build his reputation, he wrote poems—“Venus and Adonis” or “The Rape of Lucrece”—and when Ben Jonson published his plays in the high-end and expensive Folio format (in 1616) he was soundly mocked. It took forever for the English to realize that their drama was, in fact, art.

Oxford’s own plays were probably like Lyly’s plays, which are very arty and over-refined to modern tastes. I like Lyly: he’s courtly, refined, beautiful and quite funny, but he’s precious, and utterly unlike the work of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, Webster or Fletcher.

Actually corvee labor was used to build the pyramids, which means that only members of the lower classes had to work, and it was unpaid labor. It was a form of chattel slavery and would definitely fit under any modern definition of slave labor (including, for instance, the ILO Forced Labor Convention).

Others have expressed some push back to the idea that the pyramids were built with unpaid corvee labor, to which you’ve only replied with a link to a page of google search results, which is weak.  But even if we accept that the pyramids were built with unpaid corvee labor, that’s certainly not chattel slavery.  Chattel slavery specifically means “slavery in which slaves are private property that can be bought and sold at will,” and is a term that is specifically meant to exclude other forms of forced labor like serfdom, peonage, debt slavery, and, you know, corvee labor.

We have more evidence for Shakespeare’s literary and dramatic activity than we have for any other playwright of the period, because he was massively successful and connected to an equally successful company.

I thought we had a bit more on Jonson.