A controversy is raging on my post, “Shakespeare: Defence & Defecation”.

 

As a taste of the full-blown discussion, I’m posting my latest broadside in the Shakespeare Wars here:

 

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 and poor scholarship.

 

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 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.