102 Reasons

When new scholarship activity nears the Shakespearean quayside, the leaky Oxfordian tugboats mass together and bleakly chug out into the tide making as much smoke as they can. A recent article in The Guardian on Florio and his possible… go to article

Hand D, the fragment of lost play Sir Thomas More, thought to be in Shakespeare's handwriting, is in the news again. Professor Douglas Bruster, of the University of Austen, Texas, has joined Brian Vickers in claiming that a series of… go to article

A key feature of the Oxfordian case lies in the cryptic interpretation of Ben Jonson's phrasing of the Preface to the First Folio. Ben is a master of the sideways, slanting, cryptic insult, so this is not, on the face of it, the usual daft… go to article

Oxford as a brilliant writer is a construct, all made up of fantasy and theft. “What he hath left us” is a dismal little heap of slag. So then his cultists must appropriate the words of Shakespeare as a counterfeit. They must excuse their… go to article

Hours, weeks, even months have been spent arguing about Proteus and Portia's route-planning and what its accuracy or inaccuracy reveals. The first thing to say is that above all the geographical explanations, there exists the overarching… go to article

Alexander Waugh returns forcefully to the subject of sailing to Verona. In the latest rearrangement of Shakespeare Authorship Coalition Essays, published in response to Shakespeare Beyond Doubt he says: "One has only to check… go to article

I know a hawk from a handsaw,said Hamlet while plotting in Elsinore;but the Bard sadly erred - it was really a bird,not a carpenter's tool that the Prince saw. If De Vere wrote Hamlet, then the cherished Oxfordian textual… go to article

An essential task, when planting the shipwreck in the Tempest into the Oxfordian calendar or locating Prospero's island in Italy, is to explain what the 'still-vex'd Bermoothes' might be, while detaching them from the Bermoothes in the… go to article

Oxfordians claim the sonnets published as SHAKE-SPEARE’S SONNETS fit the life story of the Earl of Oxford better than they fit the life story of William Shakespeare of Stratford.  They point out correctly that the poet often refers to… go to article

'Almost no Oxfordian argument has wasted more bandwidth than Will's knowledge of Italy. The arguments have a unique brand of silliness all their own. We revisited this subject here. It was inevitable that we would… go to article

A tale from the early days of Authorship Doubters, with sincere apologies to Alistair Cooke. Good evening. Once, in the early 30's, I was travelling through The Panhandle in the tornado season when I saw a dark, sinister shape on the… go to article

John Fletcher is a black hole for Oxfordian theorists. Too close and the whole Oxfordian shebang disappears in a wail of deplorable sucking noises. It's a good job his early life isn't as well documented as Shakespeare's or there… go to article

Anyone who worked in the electronics industry in the 1980's will remember the early days of reverse engineering. Computer equipment designed in high tech facilities in Silicon Valley, Glen or Fen would be painstakingly analysed and … go to article

"Judging from their surviving writing, Shakespeare was not just 100 times better than Oxford, he was also 80 times more productive. Shakespeare wrote about 3,500 lines of verse a year for twenty years, most of them immortal; Oxford… go to article

Coriolanus’ date Is 1608  “ONE of the beauties of the Oxfordian theory is that it brings to life about two-thirds of the canon otherwise tending to be ignored; Coriolanus is a perfect example of this.” So begins an extraordinary… go to article

Is the work of the early Elvis Presley, making recordings for Sun Records in the mid-50's, distinguishable from the work of the same singer in his recorded concerts of the mid-70's? It's a difference of 20 years. The difference between… go to article

In his famous thesis, Roger Stritmatter joins Thomas J Looney in the First Article of the Oxfordian Credo which detects similarity between the work of the Bard and that of the Earl, trying for a twofer by aligning the plot of Hamlet with… go to article

There are people (including some who are certain that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays attributed to him) who believe that the character Polonius in “Hamlet,” based, at least in part, on William Cecil, Lord Burghley. … go to article

While they were both alive, Ben Jonson clearly felt a sense of rivalry with his fellow playwright. As an artist, Will not only outsold him at the box office but quite clearly had the better turn of phrase. It must have been irritating.… go to article

Macbeth is a Jacobean play, through and through. It celebrates the accession of James VI & I, and his descent through a true line of  Scottish kings, foreseen to “stretch out to the crack of doom.” In the vision summoned by… go to article

Based on Chaucer's Knight's Tale, another revealing prologue lies at the start of this late play whose authorship the records attribute to Will and John Fletcher, the successful long-term partner of Francis Beaumont. There has been a… go to article

Gabriel Harvey had a similar background to Will. He was a scholar and writer, born at Saffron Walden, Essex, the eldest son of Alice (d. 1613) and John Harvey (d. 1593), a yeoman farmer and master rope maker who was a prominent member… go to article

A little touch of Henry in the Night It's hard to understand why Oxfordians try to tie the plays to familiar biographical landmarks when the most astonishing characteristic that they all share is their inventive originality. Looking for an… go to article

Oxford didn't write Henry V. There are three distilled essences of Shakespeare in Henry V. Each is individually an anathema to the idea that they were written by an aristocrat, or a courtier, or an amateur, or a playwright from 20 or… go to article

Oxford was a patron of a theatre troupe. It wasn't a very distinguished theatre troupe and mostly toured the provinces. However, any theatre sponsorship in the 16C helped to fund the development of the English stage at a crucial point in… go to article

 There are hundreds conspiracy theories out there, They allow their subscribers to feel one up on the rest of us—in possession of a secret understood only by a select group of illuminati.  Although there is unlimited variety in… go to article

When issues are based on a balance of probabilities  you can always find an Oxfordian thumb pressed hard on one side of the scales, tilting the result in their favour.For example, the key Oxfordian claims on education involve… go to article

One area where we know De Vere excelled, to which he devoted a lot of his time, encompasses all the manly sports such as fencing and tilting. The inky, timorous De Vere in the film Anonymous doesn't look much like a man of action but the… go to article

The full online Oxford English Dictionary contains definitions for 600,000 words, almost all with an example of usage from their first occurrence in print. Many entries have dozens of quotations covering a variety of uses of the word… go to article

In a Good Oxfordian/Bad Oxfordian chapter of his book, William Farina willingly ignores the Oxfordian dating argument and goes out of his way to accept the 'orthodox' view of Two Gentlemen of Verona. In fact, there is no conventional… go to article