ArtsBeat

We'll have to wait until next year to read an English-language translation, but the UK's Daily Telegraph reported last week that a new book by German literary scholar Kurt Kreiler claims to advance the most substantial argument yet that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.   

 

Krieler's Der Mann, der Shakespeare erfand ["The Man who Invented Shakespeare"], a 22-chapter, 595-page study published by Frankfurt-based Insel Verlag in September has received a number of favorable reviews in mainstream German publications, including "Der Dichter und sein Doppelgänger", a piece by cultural critic Urs Jenny in the leading German weekly magazine Der Spiegel.

  

Krieler's book is the second by an established German language critic to venture into the Shakespeare authorship debate in the past decade. In 2004, the Austrian critic and essayist Walter Klier published Der Fall Shakespeare [The Shakespeare Affair], an "Oxfordian" view of the authorship controversy.

 

The so-called "Shakespeare authorship question" is one of the oldest and most contentious disputes in the history of literary scholarship, dating back to at least the early 18th century.  While conventional wisdom and the overwhelming majority of scholars maintain that the works attributed to "William Shakespeare" were in fact written by the actor/theater operator from Stratford-on-Avon who bore that name, a significant number of dissidents over the centuries have questioned how a 16th century English commoner from a market town in south Warwickshire with no formal education beyond grammar school could come to acquire the vast command of knowledge about the classical world, European history, the arts, sciences, and philosophy--let alone the 29,000 word vocabulary that remains the the richest and most musical of any English language author. 

 

These skeptics believe that the plays attributed to "Shakespeare" were ghostwritten by other authors or were the result of a collaborative effort, not unlike the way screenplays are written and rewritten for many of today's motion pictures.  Among the peers whose names have been advanced as possible authors of Shakespeare's plays over the past three centuries are Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, William Stanley (the 6th Earl of Derby), and most notably over the past century, Edward de Vere,  the 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), who despite the fact that he predeceased Shakespeare of Stratford by 12 years--making several of the topical historical references in the later plays problematic--remains the only candidate that contemporary "Oxfordians" believe had education and worldly experience necessary to be the author of the plays they attribute to playwright they call "Shake-Speare": a play on de Vere's nickname in royal court and his family coat of arms featuring a lion brandishing a spear.

 

Most of America's best-known Shakespeare scholars, including Yale's Harold Bloom (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human) and Harvard's Stephen Greenblatt (Will in the World) are dismissive, if not outright contemptuous, of such Oxfordian speculation.