If you're an anglophile, a lover of all things British, then this time of year must be like Christmas for you. Well, it's real Christmastime as well, but you know what I mean, right? If you have a soft spot for Dickensian carolers, candlelit mince pies, snow-covered country villages, special episodes of inexplicably popular TV shows like Downton Abbey and Doctor Who... well, in December, we all become a tiny bit British, don't we? But not everything we think we know about life across the pond is strictly "pukka." We've enlisted Sir Kenneth Jennings, VC, GBE, DJO (Distinguished Jeopardy! Order) to help us "mind the gap" between fact and fiction when it comes to Merrie Old England.
The Debunker: Did Someone Else Write the Works of Shakespeare?
It was Francis Bacon! Or Christopher Marlowe. Or could it have been Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford? With all the hype that alternate theories of Shakespeare authorship have received lately (including Anonymous, a big budget movie by Independence Day director and Shakespeare skeptic Roland Emmerich) you'd be forgiven for thinking that this is an actual academic controversy. Could someone else have written the plays of Shakespeare? It would certainly be big news if the most celebrated writer in the history of the language--of any language maybe--were revealed as a fraud.
Yes, there are groups with differing opinions on Shakespearean authorship. "Stratfordians" believe that William Shakespeare, an actor from Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote the plays attributed to him. "Anti-Stratfordians" (whose ranks include "Oxfordians," "Marlovians," and so forth) support different candidates. The only problem is that the Stratfordian view is an essentially unanimous consensus of all the world's leading authorities on Shakespeare, while anti-Stratfordians are strictly fringe.
No one ever questioned Shakespeare's authorship until the Victorian era, when a few writers began to speculate that a commoner - a glove maker's son from the West Midlands, for crying out loud - could never have written so skillfully about life among kings and other nobles. Today, this seems like a pretty snobbish objection, but it inspired a whole cottage industry. Many of these skeptics claimed that biographical information on William Shakespeare is suspiciously thin, but in fact, his life is better attested than most people of his era. We actually know more about Shakespeare than we do about other leading authors of the time, like Dante and Cervantes.
Because of all the contemporary evidence documenting the life of William Shakespeare of Stratford and linking him to his plays, anti-Stratfordians have to posit that Shakespeare was a "front" for some other secret author. Of course, there is no direct evidence for such a plot, which would be an unprecedentedly weirdness in literary history and would have required the collaboration of many prominent Elizabethans. There's a name for this kind of thing: "conspiracy theory." The Shakespeare authorship "controversy" is just as bogus as any nutty 9/11 or Kennedy assassination conspiracy you've ever heard. Edward de Vere, the anti-Stratfordians' leading candidate, died in 1604, before twelve Shakespeare plays were even written. So the anti-Stratfordians conclude that the accepted chronology must be wrong, in the manner of conspiracy theorists everywhere ignoring inconvenient facts. I can't prove to you that some secret plot didn't produce Shakespeare's plays while leaving no evidence (it's hard to prove a negative!) but I shouldn't have to. The burden of proof in a case like this should be on the crackpots. As a certain glove maker's son once wrote: "Ignorance is the curse of God, / Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven."
Quick Quiz: What Shakespearean actor's younger brother Joseph is best known for portraying the Bard in 1999's Shakespeare in Love?
Ken Jennings is the author of six books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.