I am grateful to “Recent Convert” for inspiring me to write posts in response to his comments. Yesterday I responded to his question about the Tolkien scholar, Tom Shippey; today I’m responding to the comment he appended to my post about the English Martyr, St. Luke Kirby. Specifically, “RC” wrote plaintively about the recent film, “Anonymous”, in which the nonsense-notion that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays is plunged to new levels of absurdity and depravity. RC describes the film as nothing less than an act of defecation on the reputation of the real William Shakespeare. I would agree, and am posting the condemnation of the film that I published several months ago in the UK Catholic Herald and on the Crisis website. Here’s the full text:
ANYTHING BUT ANONYMOUS: DEFENDING SHAKESPEARE AGAINST THE LATEST HOLLYWOOD NONSENSE
Almost five hundred years after his death, William Shakespeare remains one of the most important figures in human history. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Homer and Dante, he is part of the triumvirate of literary giants who straddle the centuries as permanent witnesses of the permanent things. It is, therefore, gratifying that modern scholarship is showing that this great genius was a believing Catholic in very anti-Catholic times. In this light, Anonymous, the latest Hollywood film purporting to depict Shakespeare and his times, is not only a travesty of history but an act of defamation against the Bard himself.
Anonymous is based upon the discredited “Oxfordian” hypothesis that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
The Oxfordians have erected fabulously imaginative theories to prove that Edward de Vere wrote the plays. It is, however, difficult to take their claims seriously. Edward de Vere died in 1604, a year after the death of Queen Elizabeth, and about eight years before the last of Shakespeare’s plays was written and performed! Needless to say, the Oxfordians have gone to great lengths, stretching the bounds of credulity to the very limit (and beyond), to explain why the plays were not performed until after their “Shakespeare’s” death.
Ultimately, however, all the rival theories can be disproved through the application of solid historical evidence, combined with common sense. Take, for example, the central premise of the Oxfordian case that the plays must have been written by an aristocrat or, at least, by one with a university education, on the assumption that Shakespeare, as a commoner, must have been illiterate, or, at any rate, incapable of writing literature of such sublime quality. Against such an elitist presumption, we should remind ourselves that great literature is not the preserve of the rich or the privileged. Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s contemporaries, came from poor families. Daniel Defoe and Samuel Johnson had humble origins, and Charles Dickens experienced grinding poverty as a child. G.K. Chesterton, the “Dr Johnson of his age”, was born of middle-class parents and never received a university education. Perhaps the most applicable parallel to Shakespeare’s situation is, however, the appropriately named Alexander Pope, the son of a draper, who was denied a formal education because, as with Shakespeare, his parents were Catholic. Pope’s “humble origins” and forbidden faith helped him become perhaps the finest poet of the eighteenth century.
The Oxfordians also claim that Shakespeare was too young to have written the sonnets and the early plays. He was in his mid-twenties when the earliest of the plays was written, and in his late-twenties when he wrote the sonnets. The Oxfordians question whether such a young man would be able to write such great literature. Yet Christopher Marlowe wrote the first of his produced plays in around 1587, when he was only twenty-three. Since Marlowe was murdered when he was still in his late-twenties, the whole of his considerable literary legacy rests on his formidably young shoulders. Ben Jonson’s first play was performed in 1598, when he was only twenty-six years old. Thomas Dekker published the first of his comedies in 1600, when he is thought to have been around thirty years old. John Webster published his first plays in 1607, when he was twenty-seven years old, and John Marston wrote all his plays between 1602 and 1607, between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-one. Looking at his contemporaries, Shakespeare was at exactly the age one would expect him to be when he first started writing plays. The Earl of Oxford, on the other hand, would have been around forty when the first of the plays was performed, making him a veritable geriatric by comparison.
And what about the sonnets? Was Shakespeare too young to write with such eloquence and panache? Again, let’s look at his contemporaries. Michael Drayton published his first volume of poetry when he was twenty-eight years old, exactly the same age as Shakespeare is thought to have been when he wrote the sonnets. John Donne’s finest sonnets were written when the poet was in his late twenties or early thirties. Many other great Elizabethan poets died at a young age, having already bequeathed a considerable body of work to posterity. Sir Philip Sidney was thirty-two when he died; Robert Southwell was thirty-three; Marlowe, as already noted, was twenty-nine; and Thomas Nashe was thirty-four.
Moving forward in time, we have the collective youth of the Romantic sonneteers. Byron had reached the ripe old age of thirty-six when he died, Shelley was thirty, and Keats a mere twenty-six years old. Keats never even lived to the age at which Shakespeare is thought to have written his own sonnets.
Let’s conclude with an exposé of the few remaining remnants of the Oxfordian arguments against the real Shakespeare. The fact that Shakespeare’s signature is described as being shaky or untidy is used as evidence of his “illiteracy”. Yet there is absolutely no connection between literature and calligraphy. Beautiful writing and beautiful handwriting do not necessarily go hand in hand. Many great writers had bad handwriting, and, no doubt, many great calligraphers were incapable of putting two literary sentences together. Any scholar who has pored over the mercilessly illegible handwriting of great writers will know that there is absolutely no connection between legibility and literacy.
In similar vein, Oxfordians point a scornful finger at the lack of literary flourish in Shakespeare’s will or the questionable literary merit of the poetic epitaph on his grave. Why, one wonders, should Shakespeare feel inspired to turn his will into a work of literary art? Why should he bother to write his will at all? Why shouldn’t he get his lawyer to write it? And why would Shakespeare be the least concerned with writing verse for his own gravestone? Isn’t it far more likely that someone else wrote the lines? At any rate, these pieces of “evidence” hardly warrant any serious doubt as to the authorship of the plays.
In spite of the dubious “scholarship” of Oxfordians or the febrile fantasies of Hollywood, there is no convincing argument against Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays and, in consequence, no convincing evidence that someone else wrote them. After the dust has settled on the fallen edifices of false scholarship, what is left standing among the ruins? We are left with the reliable, if mundane, reality that William Shakespeare was, in fact, William Shakespeare. We are also left with the equally reliable, if paradoxical, observation of G.K. Chesterton that “Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else.”
“I am grateful to “Recent Convert” for inspiring me to write posts in response to his comments.”
And your very welcome for that! 🙂
I’d actually like to thank your for responding to my questions/comments in detail (not to mention that you devoted whole posts to them!).
And thanks for reposting that article…it’s odd that there are people who still present the oxfordian theory as a real possibility when it looks as though it has been thoroughly debunked. I have always considered his support of it a rather sour note in Joseph Sobran’s otherwise splendid work. How did such a smart man fall for something so silly? God only knows I guess.
Oh and your condemnation reminded me of a few things I forgot to mention about “Anonymous”. Namely:
-Marlowe, whom it was strongly suggested was killed by, if you can believe it, Shakespeare himself. Shakespear the murderer? The film thinks so anyway. Add that to his repertoire. I believe it was because Marlowe found out about the fraud and was going to reveal it.
-Ben Jonson also played a big role in the film, he was who the Earl of Oxford originally went to, but Jonson hesitated, and Shakespeare took credit without asking. The Earl was quite upset over this; a MERE ACTOR?! THE OUTRAGE!
-Shakespeare was also portrayed as illiterate.
-Did I mention that the Earl of Oxford had a love affair with Elizabeth (who we later found out was his grandmother, or was it his mother? I can’t remember. Either way they had a son together…).
I’ll leave it off there, no need to keep diving into that terrible film.
A Black Hole of Research
In the bag, his head in the bag, where all the research is,
‘Aren’t you getting a little obsessive?’
‘It’s my life, I’m devoted to it’.
He researches Shakespeare or rather Edward de Vere.
He believes Edward de Vere (the 7th Earl of Oxford)
Was William Shakespeare.
He goes to California where they like to hear-
Edward de Vere was William Shakespeare.
(They like ‘Oxfordians’ Californians).
He shows me photographs of their mansions when he gets back.
I am interested in whether they put him up, pay his airfare?
But he doesn’t want to talk about that.
Something in the Tempest, encrypted in the text,
Which is connected with a shipwreck off the coast of Barbados,
de Vere was involved in,
Which moves nicely onto the Rosicrucian Order,
Some burial site off Nova Scotia,
I can’t remember…to do with the Knights Templar.
Oh, it’s all some great big conspiracy theory,
Deep in the 16th/17th Centuries,
And I weary.
I said exasperated:‘Ophelia’s lament is so beautiful, don’t you think?’
An impatient ‘yes’ ‘I mean it is so beautiful, isn’t it?’
‘Yes yes’
The star exhibit;
In the negative (of a photograph of a painting)
de Vere pointing to a spear, is it?
The bust in the Stratford church.
Guess what?
More research.
The folios not signed, sceptical of the will,
The use of legal words
(‘he couldn’t possibly know’).
A big black leather bag it is,
He head down in it;
A black hole.
The traditional Stratfordian theory presents us with a major disconnect between the life of the presumed author and his creative output. It’s almost as if we have a disembodied body of works with little or no relationship to the author.
Several points should be considered.
1) In twenty years of supposedly living in London, not a single letter exists from or to William Shakespeare. Shakespeare (referring to the actor from Stratford) left no letters or other writing in his own name, except for six crude signatures that are barely legible. There is only one known letter addressed to him — it was about 30 pounds and it was never delivered.
Yes, documents from 400 years ago could be lost, yet we have letters from Thomas Nashe, Philip Massinger, Gabriel Harvey, Samuel Daniel, George Peele, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and William Drummond, Anthony Mundy, John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe and others, many of them lesser writers.
2) While there is sufficient documentation to trace the growth of the other artists you mentioned, there is no evidence that William of Stratford could have acquired the vast educational, linguistic or cultural background necessary to write the masterpieces of English literature ascribed to Shakespeare. His plays reveal knowledge of languages, the law, Latin and Greek classics, medicine, falconry, the sea, music, and nature that is so deep it could have only been learned through personal experience.
3) He left no books or manuscripts in his will, though, at the time of his death, 20 of his famous plays remained unpublished. Indeed, his will gives no indication that the deceased was engaged in literary activities of any sort.
4) He took no legal action against the pirating of the Shakespeare plays or the apparently unauthorized publication of Shake-speare’s Sonnets in 1609, even though he was known to frequently initiate lawsuits to recover petty sums of money owed to him.
5) His parents, siblings, and daughters were all illiterate except that one daughter could sign her own name. Would the greatest writer in English history have allowed this?
6) He was so well known that at the height of Shakespeare’s alleged fame, tax collectors could not discover where he lived.
7) Shake-speare’s Sonnets, published in 1609, paint a portrait of the artist as a much older man. The scholarly consensus today holds that most of the Sonnets were written in the 1590s, when Shakspere of Stratford was in his late 20s to late 30s, a relatively youthful age even in Elizabethan times.
Yet, the author of the Sonnets at times is clearly much older and anticipating his own imminent death. Inexplicably, the publisher’s dedication in the 1609 volume of Sonnets refers to Shakespeare as our ever-living poet, a term that implies the poet is already dead, but Shakspere of Stratford was still very much alive until 1616.
8) At his death, there were no eulogies, no testimonials, or tributes, not even from fellow actors, playwrights, or his esteemed friend, Ben Jonson. His only alleged connection to the plays came seven years after his death in the tribute by Ben Jonson in the First Folio. Why was no notice taken of Shakspere of Stratford’s death if he was such a literary luminary?
9) The Sonnets also suggest strongly that Shakespeare was a pen name and that the author’s real identity was destined to remain unknown. In Sonnet 72 Shakespeare asks that “My name be buried where my body is”. Sonnet 81: “Though I, once gone, to all the world must die”. If Shakspere of Stratford truly was the famous author of the Sonnets, why would he think his name would be buried with his body? The name Shakespeare which appears on the title page of the Sonnets themselves — certainly wasn’t buried with the body of the poet, whoever he was.
10) There is no evidence of a single payment to Shakspere of Stratford as an author. Nor is there any evidence of Shakspere of Stratford seeking out or establishing an ongoing literary patron as was a common practice for writers of the day.
11. Shakespeare is not known to have traveled outside of England, yet the plays reveal an extensive knowledge of Italy and France.
12. The plays reveal an intimate familiarity with court life and manners that Shakespeare, as a commoner, could not have obtained simply by conversations at the Mermaid Tavern.
13. Shakespeare’s point of view in the plays and poems is always that of an aristocrat. He has created commoners, but they are mostly buffoons who mangle the language. He portrays the nobility as individuals, but the lower classes as types, even stereotypes.
14) Many books that were used as source material for the plays were not translated into English in Shakespeare’s time. For example:
Francois de Belleforest Histories tragiques
Ser Giovanni Fioranetino’s Il Pecorone
Epitia and Hecatommithi
Luigi da Porto’s Romeus and Juliet (Italian)
Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (Spanish)
Shakespeare’s reliance on books in foreign languages puzzles the experts, so we can suppose all sorts of things rather than conclude the obvious. If the man who was Shakespeare regularly relied on books not yet translated from Italian, French, and Spanish, then he must have been able to read in Italian, French, and Spanish. We know specifically that Edward de Vere was fluent in four foreign languages, Latin, Greek, Italian, and French.
15) The Shakespeare plays and poems show that the author had specific knowledge of certain works of literature, certain prominent persons in Elizabeth’s court, and events connected with them. In the sonnets and the plays there are frequent references to events that are paralleled in the life of Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.
The evidence for Oxford is strong and I would even call it compelling but it requires looking under the surface of many common myths that are circulating and reading books about the life of Edward de Vere and the case for his authorship.
Mr. Morris: Sorry, I’m not familiar with Shadowplay.
I would really recommend you read it. It throws light on man of those impenetrable passages found in Shakespeare. ‘Nurse’s speeches in R&J for instance. We now see many of the references are to the Jesuit mission in England. The whole ‘code’ of ‘High’ and ‘Low’ for Catholicism, Protestantism (respectively) cannot be understood in any other way.
There is a welter of evidence.
Did you know that the property in Blackfriars which Shakespeare owned was a renowned place of catholic recusancy?
I believe Tudor England was in modern parlance a Totalitarian regime. That expalins why the catholic Shakespeare had to be so circumspect in his dealings/statements. He was living under a terror.
You assert-(if I may)
‘His parents, siblings, and daughters were all illiterate except that one daughter could sign her own name. Would the greatest writer in English history have allowed this?
Really, how do you know they were all illiterate? I find that very difficult to believe. His father was the mayor of Stratford at one time wasn’t he?
You write-
‘Yet, the author of the Sonnets at times is clearly much older and anticipating his own imminent death.’
Well he was probably was, ‘anticipating his own imminent death’. From the Protestant (Tudor) persecution.
Mr. Schumann,
With all due respect, I suggest that you read any of several biographies of the real and only Shakespeare. I will suggest my own biography, The Quest for Shakespeare, not least because it contains a five page selected bibliography of other books on the subject. The lack of a paper trail with regard to Shakespeare has more to do with his Catholic faith than with any alleged illiteracy. Regarding the latter, I suggest you study Michael Wood’s superb research into Elizabethan grammar school education. Shakespeare was excluded from Oxford and Cambridge because of his Catholicism, not because of his lack of education. I could say much more but will defer to either of my own books on the subject, with another pending, or to the numerous other books in the aforementioned bibliography.
Sorry, I don’t have the energy to be drawn into a lengthy discussion of the issues. I have been involved in many and it is a no-win situation, especially if you haven’t read any books about the life of Edward de Vere and the case for his authorship.
Yes I have read several Stratfordian biographies. They are one page of fact and 600 pages of supposition and speculation. The fact that some works were published under the attribute of William Shakespeare does not identify the man behind the name.
There is nothing in his handwriting ever discovered except for six almost illegible signatures. There are no letters, no correspondence, no manuscripts, no paper trail at all to identify the man behind the name, not a single word. Nobody claims to having ever met the man. When contemporaries refer to William Shakespeare, they are referring to the name on the title page and nothing else.
This cannot be explained away as evidence of his Catholicism. There is simply no evidence other than speculation to support it.
The few facts we know about Shakespeare from Stratford are stretched, pulled, and twisted to make it plausible that he was the author. There is nothing in his biography to connect him with the works. He seems merely to have been a man of the world, buying up property, laying in ample stocks of barley and malt, when others were starving, selling off his surpluses and pursuing debtors in court….”
You have singled out one or two of the points I raised and ignored the others.
The Sonnets are written by a man who is clearly much older than William of Stratford. Conventional chronology dates the sonnets to between 1592 and 1596. At this time, William of Stratford would have been in his late twenties and early thirties (Oxford was 14 years older). Even if we up the date to 1599, William of Stratford was still in his thirties.
The sonnets tell us that the poet was in his declining years when writing them. He was “Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity,” “With Time’s injurious hand crushed and o’er worn”, in the “twilight of life”. He is lamenting “all those friends” who have died, “my lovers gone”. His is “That time of year/When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/Upon those boughs that shake against the cold.”
The sonnets that most contradict Will of Stratford’s life story are those about shame and disgrace to name and reputation. Here Shakespeare’s biographers have nothing to go on.
The first seventeen sonnets are written to the “fair youth” urging him to marry. The fair youth is almost unanimously agreed by scholars to be Henry Wriothesely, the Third Earl of Southampton. No commoner would be permitted to address an Earl in this manner. I will stop here.
To Howard Schumann
Could I ask you, with respect, what do you think of Shadowplay?
Mr. Schumann, It seems that we have one thing indubitably in common: Neither of us has the time or energy to be drawn into a lengthy discussion when there are books that will answer all the issues raised. I refer you once again to my book, The Quest for Shakespeare, and especially to the opening chapter in which I address the Oxfordian case and answer most of the points that you make. I have read Sobran’s case for Oxford and Field’s argument against Shakespeare and find them not only unconvincing but full of abject nonsense.
I’ll take one or two of your points at random:
The vast majority of great sonnets have been written by young men who were about the age that Shakespeare would have been in the 1890s. I list of a host of Shakespeare’s contemporaries and other poets through the ages up to and including Keats, who all wrote their finest sonnets when they were in their twenties. If the sonnets had been written by a middle-aged man, such as the Earl of Oxford, it would have been a singular and odd case of an older man indulging in the preferred poetic form of youth. And to say that the sonnets could not have been written by a young man because they touch upon themes of mortality and mutability is quite frankly nonsense. Look at the way that the Romantic sonneteers address these issues.
I could say much more, but will conclude by saying that anyone who understands the deeply Christian spirituality and morality of the plays would not believe that Oxford could have been their author.
Joseph Pearce, before you view the Authorship Question through the prism of Catholicism, I would suggest first putting in your contacts. We Oxfordians are not afflicted with the myopia that seems to be so prevalent in orthodox Shakespearean circles. No fan of Edward de Vere, I daresay, came to the conclusion of his authorship without having first read dozens of basic scholarly works on the topic, including books, essays and blogs that present and corroborate the hundreds of facts linking him to the Shakespearean canon. Unlike orthodox adherents, we are very open to ideas posited by the other side for the simple reason that no “biography,” no proof, no theory has yet to answer the Authorship Question as definitively as does the life of de Vere. Once inoculated with the truth, it’s easy to ward off the Stratfordian malady in all its modern permutations. While I applaud your reading of Sobran, I must prescribe a hefty dose of Charlton Ogburn, Richard F Whalen, Mark Anderson, Katherine Chiljan, Roger Stritmatter, and Richard Roe. You’ll feel much better! They did wonders for me.
Thank you for sharing your sentiments. The real conflict is not between Sony Pictures Entertainment and the Shakespeare Trust, it is between our beloved diamond jubilee QE2 (Her minions) and the rest of the intellectual world. Picture a crusade against the disembodied view. ( Here is an accurate portrait of the disembodied: http://findingshakespeare.co.uk/the-flower-portrait-of-shakespeare ) One side of the crusade is determined to reveal the truth about the characteristics in the text which identify the real playwright, and that not one characteristic is found in the Stratford man. Thus, the Stratford “Shakespeare” is a hoax defended by the other side of the crusade, which perpetuates the fraud because they know from experience the devout swarm in from all all over the world to worship an ignorant, unknown man from a tiny village on an unimportant river. – And that they would never, ever, enjoy a decent tourist trade that promotes a super-rich young kid whose family possessed more property in England than Elizabeth I, had the highest rank allowed with complete access to Elizabeth’s court plus the privilege to put on any performance about flawed royals and nobles. – And, finally, the worst possible excuse – this spoiled brat’s biography exceeds a thousand corollaries to the plays!
I take pleasure in commenting upon Mr. Joseph Pearce’s article “Shakespeare: Defence and Defecation”.
I would first point out that the introductory clause, “Almost five hundred years after his death, Shakespeare…” does not apply to Mr. Pearce’s believed author of the Shakespeare canon, Gulielmus Shakspere, who died in 1616. That was 396 years ago, a hundred and four years fewer than five hundred. A simple error of arithmetic and no problem.
Next, Mr. Pearce avers that an odious film ‘Anonymous’, purporting that ‘Shakespeare’ was Edward de Vere’s pseudonym, seriously defames “the Bard himself.” By the Bard, Mr. Pearce means that Gulielmus Shakspere who was born, raised in, then left and returned to, Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire where he died quietly in 1616.
The ‘Anonymous’ theory for who wrote the Shakespeare canon, which is called Oxfordian because Edward de Vere was the 17th Earl of Oxford, has been “discredited” as a legitimate hypothesis, according to Mr. Pearce. He points out one outstanding reason for this discredited status–that de Vere died eight years before (‘The Tempest’) “was written and performed!”
The Oxford theory is further discredited, in Mr. Pearce’s view, by its mistaken assumption that only an aristocrat could have written ‘Shakespeare’,and he only through a university education, and the additional mis-assumptions that Shakspere was both illiterate and too young to have written both plays and sonnets.
What the elements of this argument indicate to me is that Mr. Pearce knows little to nothing of Oxfordian scholarship. From the relatively plentiful records about Shakspere, he never expressed an interest in writing, never was sponsored or known as a prospective writer, was never written to or wrote anyone in return, left no paraphrenalia associated with writing, was never remembered, eulogized, memorialized as a writer, even by his own family–who were uniformly illiterate except for his son in law, who had nothing to say about him in seven volumes of his journal. It was not until seven years after he died in 1616 that Shakspere had any importance in the Shakespeare story. Then it was ambiguously implied that the name-alike (Shakspere) and the pseudonym (‘Shakespeare’) were the same being, in the First Folio introduction.
Regarding his particular proof, that ‘The Tempest’ was written and performed in 1611, long after de Vere was dead in 1604, this has been shown to be completely mistaken and no more than an assertion. (See Stritmatter & Kositsky) All topical and classical references in the play were available before 1603. The supposed source, the Strachey Letter, copied the play and other sources rather than was copied from it. Strachey was a notorious plagiarer and he did not publish his letter until 1625.
I would differ also with Mr. Pearce’s other, more general, argumentation. The Shakespeare canon shows enormous classical learning, which could have been acquired by Shakspere, if Shakspere had a vocation for writing and learning and had lived among the aristocracy all his life, including at the highest levels of power and influence.
But all evidence points to the fact that this did not happen. And the six attempted signatures, which constitute Shakspere’s entire literary career, have been cited as proof of his illiteracy not the opposite. He could not form a letter twice in the same way over six attempts or spell his name in the same pattern. It is not a case of literature versus calligraphy. That would be trivial. In good health, he could only try to make marks resembling a signature, at a time when that was a point of pride with any literate person. There is a surviving legend that he expressed pain if he were even asked to write. All four characters in the Shakespeare canon named William are contemptuously portrayed as illiterate and knaves. (MWW, 1HIV, AYLI)
From the lack of any reasonable proof that Shakspere was ‘Shakespeare’ and from the substantial amount of proof that Shakspere was utilized posthumously as a counterfeit for the author behind the ‘Shakespeare’ pseudonym, I cannot agree with Mr. Pearce’s convictions.
His extensive subsequent discussion of how old you have to be to be a poet or playwright becomes irrelevant under these circumstances. For the sake of friendly generosity, I will add that de Vere was recognized as a child prodigy, that he wrote plays from the age of twelve, that he wrote Romeus and Juliet in 1562, his twelfth year, that he put on plays from adolescence on, that the plays produced at Court have the same names and plots as the later ‘Shakespearean plays’, all of them sponsored by Queen Elizabeth I. He had her protection while he lived. He wrote early and he wrote late.
It is my own conviction that the Western tradition should recognize the true author its most outstanding literary corpus of work. That it has not to this point is owing mainly to a Jacobean political ruse, to get out the work without connecting it to its controversial nobleman author, which became legend, then Tradition, and now Indisputable Fact. We are gullible creatures and these things not only happen, they have happened in central aspects of our cultural life. Hence slavery was once respectable, Jews were blood-drinkers, the stars revolved around the earth, and a Genius without writing skills wrote the Shakespeare canon.