What’s in a Name? The Shakespeare Authorship Debate

EPISODE 109 | What's in a Name? The Shakespeare Authorship Debate

Guest: Scott Jackson, Mary Irene Ryan Executive Artistic Director of Shakespeare at the University of Notre Dame, current vice president of the Shakespeare Theatre Association (STA) and incoming president, actor, director and Shakespeare scholar 

William Shakespeare wrote at least 36 plays, 154 sonnets, two narrative poems and a few shorter poems - more than 884,000 words total, more than 1700 of which he invented. But just who was this guy? Was he really "the Man from Stratford", or merely a pen name for... well someone else?

We look at some of the more popular Anti-Stratfordian theories and also look at why some people seem hell bent on proving that someone else, anyone else, actually wrote all that stuff.

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SECTIONS

1. 03:02 - Upstart Crow - No evidence of his education, the First Folio, not much biographical evidence, a common hand, Bardathon
2. 12:28 - The Ireland Shakespeare Forgeries - Compiling the First Folio, Vortigern and Rowena gets most of a performance
3. 19:13 - The Baconian Theory - Bardolotry, Hart's The Romance of Yachting, Robert W. Jameson's "Who Wrote Shakespeare?", James Wilmot makes a bonfire
4. 24:19 - Delia Bacon goes for the Rutland Theory, then the Groupists Theory, then all in on Bacon, travels to England, gets into codes and ciphers, loses her mind, inspires the New Historicists and cultural poetics; William Henry Smith and Nathaniel Homes kick off the Baconist Theory
5. 30:11 - Baconist Orville Ward Owen builds a machine to find "proof", the first Mock Trial (1892-93)
6. 33:17 - The Derbyite Theory & the Marlovian Theory - Classism, partnership with Marlowe, death and pseudonyms 
7. 39:57 - The Rutlandite Theory & More - More classism, Baconists still persist, more expeditions from Owen, schoolteacher Elizabeth Wells Gallup gets into codes, Stylometrics, the Claremont Shakespeare Authorship Clinic
8. 44:31 - The Oxfordian Theory - John Thomas Looney fingers Edward de Vere based on spurious logic, lots jump on this bandwagon, geography in Shakespeare, "the coast of Bohemia", the media focuses on "reasonable doubt" over evidence, how plays were written back then, evidence gets lost in time
9. 50:18 - A Single Hand - Though there is some reasonable doubt, Shakespeare probably wrote Shakespeare; Applied Shakespeare, humanity owns him, Shakespeare as a force for good (PTSD therapy, in prisons, etc.)

• Music by Fanette Ronjat

More Info:

• Shakespeare Was Shakespeare by Isaac Butler on Slate
• Revisited Myth # 68: Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare on History Myths Debunked
• The Shakespeare Index on TheatreHistory.org
• 20 words and phrases you didn’t know Shakespeare invented
• Shakespeare's Words
• Shakespeare's Phrases
• Bard-a-thon at Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre
• Ian McKellen performs Sir Thomas More, Act II, Scene 4 video
• "The Strangers' Case" Speech from Sir Thomas More with various speakers and annotations
• Professor Sir Stanley Wells
• Peter Holland, McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies at University of Notre Dame
• James Shapiro, playwright and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University
• Stephen Greenblatt, general editor of The Norton Shakespeare, John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University
• The Shakespeare First Folio
• Vortigern and Rowena text
• The Confessions of William-Henry Ireland on WikiSource
• William Henry Ireland's Shakespeare Forgeries on Hoaxes.org
• Bardolotry on Wikipedia
• James Wilmot and Shakespeare's Authorship
• Bacon Bacon Shakespeare Spy 
• The Doctor Who Designed a Cipher Wheel to Decode Shakespeare
• Theories of identity – the alleged Shakespeare mystery 
• Marlowe as Shakespeare
• The Controversy of Shakespeare and Marlowe
• Christopher Marlowe Has Officially Been Credited as Co-Author of 3 Shakespeare Plays
• Born with Teeth by Liz Duffy Adams webpage
• Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland on ShakespeareAuthorship.com
• Shakespeare by the Numbers: What Stylometrics Can and Cannot Tell Us
• The Claremont Shakespeare Clinic
• Computer Reads Shakespeare, Dismisses Authorship Candidate
• The Claremont Shakespeare Authorship Clinic: How Severe Are the Problems?
• The Globe theatre fire of 1613: when Shakespeare’s playhouse burned down
• The Great Fire of London
• Finding Shakespeare - Skeptoid podcast
• What Shakespeare can teach us about conspiracy theories today
• How Shakespeare describes post-traumatic stress disorder
• In Shakespeare, veterans find a “tower of strength”
• Shakespeare and Possibility, Part 1: Shakespeare in Prisons video
• Shakespeare in Prisons
• Shakespeare Theater Association
• Prague Shakespeare Company (Shakespeare Summer Intensive (SSI)

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