Replies

The 16th Earl of Oxford Edward De Vere was a Catholic, and is most likely the person who wrote all of Shakespear.

My absolute favourite: Oxford was the real Shakespeare! We should believe that a man well attested in contemporary records as the actual writer, i.e. William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, was actually a fraud and all these plays were actually secretly written by this nobleman under a fictitious name. And why? Because there are no letters from him. No manuscripts. Too few references to him being a playwright. And there are not enough signatures with too little attention to spelling. We should ignore that contemporary writer, and rarely questioned, Christopher Marlowe never left a single manuscript or letter, left only one signature, which he mispelled (Aha!), and was never once during his lifetime referred to by another as a poet or a playwright. Who wrote his stuff? Maybe Oxford actually wrote everything published or performed during the Elizabethan age?

But, my favourite aspect of this argument is rarely discussed. We are supposed to believe that this man perpetrated the biggest cover-up this side of anything written by Dan Brown because as a nobleman he could not be associated with writing plays. It would have destroyed his reputation and so he had to use a false identity which was maintained even after his death when Ben Jonson et al brought out the First Folio. It was so important to keep up this ruse that people even secretly tore down and reconstructed the bust on Shakespeare's monument in Stratford. Under no circumstances could Oxford ever be thought to have written plays! It would be a scandal! But, one may ask just why we should think that Oxford would have ever been able to write a play? What proof is there? Simply the plays he wrote under his own name! Now, isn't that odd. Maybe it was only writing the greatest works in the history of the English language which would cause all this horrible scandal. I suppose writing forgettable trash was no big deal.