Continuing our ongoing lampooning of the Hollywood film, Anonymous, and the crackpot Oxfordian theory about the authorship of Shakespeare’s play that was its banal and inane inspiration, here’s an excellent rhetorical demolition of the Oxfordian hypothesis by David Bentley Hart in First Things: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/11/mediocrityrsquos-tribute
Good Sense on Oxfordian Nonsense
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About the Author: Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce is a Catholic author and biographer who has written about subjects as various as GK Chesterton, economics, and Shakespeare.
Of course, Hart is right. Why on earth people keep up this nonsense, I don’t know.
There is something in literature called “voice” and it’s virtually impossible to mimic past detection. Such mimicry would bespeak greater literary talent than the original–and hardly worth the effort to the mimic.
There’s nothing historical, or (more important) textual, to suggest that anyone wrote Shakespeare except Shakespeare. On the other hand, there is ample evidence, historical and textual, to suggest that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.
A far more interesting question (to me, anyway) is–why are some people so obsessed with proving that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare? What has got so many panties in such terrible twists?