The Empire “Strikes” Back?
How Stratfordians have failed to Refute Oxfordian Claims
By Kevin Gilvary
© DVS 2004
7 Reasserting the Stratfordian Claim
Some very dubious claims have been made in this context, although interestingly these claims are not
always included in any of the studies cited in the further reading.
Warwickshire dialect in the plays
Wood (17-18) claims that some of the vocabulary in the works: ‘the Warwickshire boy would constantly
betray his origins in the easy way he slipped into rural custom and country talk.’ He gives five examples,
including: ‘hade land’ for the top of a furrow made by a plough team; ‘Red Lammas’ being the wheat sown
in Gloucestershire at the end of August; ‘kecksies’ the kind of grass which kids make whistle. Five examples
among a vocabulary extending well beyond 30,000 words scarcely adds up to ‘constantly’. Wood quotes no
authority on this assertion and there is no mention of which dialect in Crystal and Crystal (Shakespeare’s
Words: A Glossary and Language Companion. 2002). Wood seems to overlook the fact that in Elizabethan times,
London was small and that the Queen and court travelled through the countryside on the famous progresses.
We are all agreed that Shakespeare had an enquiring mind; the use of a small number of infrequently used
dialectal expressions would not be surprising from Oxford-as-Shakespeare.
Genius
Genius alone cannot explain Shakespeare’s achievements in his work – genius must have material to work
on. With Michelangelo, it was both physical materials such as marble or paint and an artistic tradition. For
Shakespeare who emulated and surpassed the greatest comedies and tragedies of both Latin and Italian
drama, he must have read extensively in these traditions
Stratford Grammar School
Shakespeare attended Stratford Grammar School and ‘the distinctive literary traces of Shakespeare’s solid
Elizabethan grammar-school education visible throughout the works.’ Wood has also asserted that: Baldwin
demonstrated that the author must have had a grammar school education, exactly – no more and no less.
In fact Baldwin does no such thing. In two volumes, he surveyed the entire evidence for education in the
Tudor period. By considering what was known to have been taught at other grammar schools (where there
are relevant records), he attempted to conjecture what was taught at Stratford, for where there are no records
extant.
Shakespeare’s reading was not exceptional.
Gibson claims (180): ‘There is no evidence that he knew any more than any other moderately well-educated
man of his period.’ In fact, the author of the works of Shakespeare was exceptionally well-read. This has
been demonstrated, briefly by Robert Miola Shakespeare’s Reading (2000) and Stuart Gillespie Shakespeare’s
Books (2001) and at length by Geoffrey Bullough Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (8 volumes,
1957 - 1975) and Naseeb Shaheen Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (1999). Where did Shakespeare
perform this reading? In medieval England, the centres of learning were the universities, the monasteries
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The Empire “Strikes” Back?
How Stratfordians have failed to Refute Oxfordian Claims
By Kevin Gilvary
© DVS 2004
and the courts, and. After the monasteries were suppressed in England, there remained the London Court
and the two universities. Therefore, in order to become highly educated, students had to attend Oxford or
Cambridge and/or have private tuition. Conversations with foreign visitors, whether or not at a public alehouse, was not a reliable sources of literature and culture for any author let alone one so immensely learned
as Shakespeare.
Contemporary Allusions.
It is counter-argued that many contemporaries asserted that William of Stratford wrote the plays. Dobson
says (31): ‘Any theory suggesting that the theatre professional William Shakespeare did not write the
Shakespeare canon somehow has to explain why so many of his contemporaries said that he did (from
Heminges, Condell, Jonson, and the other contributors to the Folio through Francis Meres and the Master
of the Revels to the parish authorities of Holy Trinity in Stratford, to name only a few), and [must also
explain] why none of the rest said that he did not.’
The problem here is that these testimonies do not surface until he publication of the First Folio (F1,
1623) which was an enormous undertaking. It is said that F1 was the greatest publication that had hitherto
been undertaken. As many of the plays were already published under the name Shakespeare, it would make
commercial sense to continue to use the name (or pseudonym). Dedications were extravagant in the
Elizabethan and Jacobean period anyway, although Jonson’s commendations are excessive: the point is why
did these people, who knew William of Stratford, left no record during his lifetime and remained silent until
the publication of F1.
Oxfordians argue that ‘the grand possessors’, those who held the unpublished manuscripts, were closely
connected to the Incomparable Brethren, the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, both of whom had a
close family connection with Oxford.
We know more about Shakespeare than about any contemporary
playwright.
This line of argument seems to have originated with Sidney Lee (1898) and is true insofar as there is evidence
for his business dealings, his will, his depositions in the Belott-Mountjoy case etc. What is absent is the kind
of literary detail which would illuminate him as a person who wrote plays. Kathman claims that the evidence
for Shakespeare’s authorship is “much more abundant” than for other writers of the time and that it is
“mutually reinforcing”. This is simply untrue as Diana Price has illustrated in her study Shakespeare’s
Unorthodox Biography (2001). Of 24 contemporaries, she finds that all have some kind of evidence pointing
to them as a person who wrote poetry. Johnson passes all 10 tests; John Webster has three hits - William of
Stratford has none.
All playwrights wrote about the Court.
Bate (Genius 92) summarises this argument as follows: ‘The argument that Shakespeare must have been
an aristocrat because he wrote so knowingly about courts is facile. Every Elizabethan and Jacobean
professional dramatist wrote about courts, yet none of them was a courtier.’ This rather sweeping
generalisation is rather easily countered: firstly, Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst contributed to the writing
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The Empire “Strikes” Back?
How Stratfordians have failed to Refute Oxfordian Claims
By Kevin Gilvary
© DVS 2004
of Gorboduc (c1561) , John Lyly (Oxford’s protégé, whose plays were performed at court in the 1580s and
of course Oxford himself. If Bate is going to insist on ‘professional’ then one would have to answer that
such well-connected courtiers did not need the fee usually attached to a play at about £6. In passing one
might also ask how Shakespeare, a dedicated playwright earning £6 per play could have afforded the
purchase of New Place in 1597 (‘strong evidence of his success as an actor and playwright in London’
Dobson) which has been estimated at £120. The difference is that the works Shakespeare are almost
exclusively concerned with rulers and nobles. Marlowe, Jonson and other writers also wrote frequently about
common people. In Shakespeare, common people are ignored (there are no peasants in Hamlet) or
lampooned (e.g. Bardolph, Pistol and Nym in Henry V).
Bate continues (93): ‘Courts are things you can learn about from books and gossip; besides, the
dramatists saw the court from the inside when their companies were commissioned to put on special
performances there.’ Against this is should be noted that Shakspere is not mentioned in court records until
1595 when about 6-10 plays are said to have been written. Given that Shakespeare is re-writing English
History to the glory of the Tudor Monarchy, it is astonishing that nobody such as Burghley or Walsingham
apparently noticed this.
Five-act play structures.
According to Jonathan Bate (Genius 68), carefully planned five act play structures only came into fashion in
the Jacobean period after Oxford had died. Strangely enough, many of the plays recognised as sources used
by Shakespeare had a five-act play structure e.g. Plautus’ Menaechmi (a major source for The Comedy of Errors);
and both Ariosto’s I Suppositi and Gascoigne’s 1566 translation The Supposes for The Taming of The Shrew and
Seneca’s Phaedra for Titus Andronicus. If Shakespeare is doing this in his early plays, published in the 1590s,
there is no need to suppose that it was an innovation in the Jacobean period
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