
Shakespeare: Actor, Playwright, Social Climber - benbreen
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/theater/shakespeare-coat-of-arms.html
======
kapitza
These documents sound legit, but methinks Alan Nelson doth protest too much.

All Oxfordians (people who believe "Shakespeare" was a beard/pen name for
Edward de Vere) agree that Shakespeare was an actor, ie, "player." It's also
well-known that acting was a low-status occupation in Elizabethan society,
explaining why people mocked Shakespeare's coat of arms.

Writing, especially writing erudite verse in the Tudor court style, was not a
low-status occupation in Elizabethan society. Anonymity/pseudonymity was not
universal, but common.

So an Oxfordian would ask: why is Shakespeare, as a social climber, awarded
arms for a low-status profession that's considered basically artisanal in
caste, leading to general mockery, when in fact he practices the high-status
profession of courtly playwright/poet?

Social climbers were not at all unheard of in the Elizabethan world. What is
unheard of is a social climber who is not a social lion, whose resume is well-
attested, whose presence and personality is constantly documented -- like,
say, Ben Jonson.

Doctors say: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses. Maybe Shakespeare wasn't a
social climber at all, but remained a country bumpkin his whole life, as he
moved from stagehand to actor to what we'd now call a producer? Maybe the
plays and sonnets read like late Tudor court poetry because they are late
Tudor court poetry? Maybe, like much Tudor court poetry, it was written
pseudonymously, not for publication?

The one coincidence that Oxfordians have to explain is how Vere wound up
publishing under the name of this real individual, Shakespeare. Who (like Vere
himself, of course) was involved in the theater world. Pseudonyms are typical
in Tudor court poetry, but "beards" aren't.

My guess, an idea I've never seen anyone else broach for obvious reasons, is
that Will Shakespeare's first occupation when he came to London was... male
prostitute. Again, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses. Maybe Vere just
thought this week's boy had a pretty name.

Here's some Tudor court poetry, by the way:

[http://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/what-is-desire-by-
edw...](http://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/what-is-desire-by-edward-de-
vere/)

Note the second stanza, which sounds exactly like Shakespeare to my ear. No
one else from the period sounds like this. An Oxfordian would call this
Shakespearean juvenilia.

~~~
spaced_out
You are aware that de Vere died in 1604, and Shakespeare published 13 plays
between then and his death in 1616? Among those 13 are some of his best works,
like King Lear and Macbeth, so it's not like he was running out of 'A'
material in those years either.

>Maybe the plays and sonnets read like late Tudor court poetry because they
are late Tudor court poetry?

I imagine you as some sort of cartoonish stereotype of a British noble,
twirling your moustache as you say: "Because surely, a mere commoner could
never have written such great works!"

The fact is that Shakespeare worked at the Globe Theater as a playwright when
these plays were produced, and received much critical acclaim for his writing.
No one disputed that during his lifetime. Furthermore, his father was an
alderman, the rough equivalent of a town councilman in Stratford, so although
Shakespeare was not a noble, he did come from an educated family.

Of course, hundreds of years later, people can make up all sorts of stories to
explain why someone would pour hours of work into writing poetry in iambic
pentameter, see them praised, give credit to a random bum, and continue to do
this for decades (even from beyond the grave, apparently). There is, however,
not a shred of evidence to back any of this. The fact that the writer of those
plays was clearly very talented is not evidence against them being written by
William Shakespeare. The fact that "to [your] ear" they sound like something
de Vere wrote is not evidence of anything either.

Shakespeare conspiracies are literally Ancient Aliens level history. "There
are some details we don't know about history, so therefore aliens!" is
replaced with: "there are some details of Shakespeare's life we don't know, so
therefore it must have been some sort of crazy conspiracy!"

~~~
kapitza
The dating of the Shakespeare plays is incredibly arbitrary and unknowable.
Are you aware how thin an evidentiary foundation our knowledge of these issues
rests on?

By "no one questioned" you mean "no one even referred to." Except for the
preface of the First Folio.

A 16th-century alderman in Stratford is not an "educated" status. Most experts
of any persuasion agree that Shakespeare's father was probably illiterate. He
signed his name with a mark:

[http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/10-things-you-
didn...](http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/10-things-you-didnt-know-
about-william-shakespeare)

The classical education received by a top-tier nobleman of the time was far
superior (at least in terms of Greek and Latin) to anything available today.
The number of Englishmen who received this quality of education was incredibly
small.

A better analogy might be, say, NFL quarterbacks. If I see someone who can win
the Super Bowl at quarterback, and I'm not sure about his identity, I can be
pretty sure he's spent most of his life training as a QB, was a high-school
star and probably a college star, etc. That's going to be a pretty small set.
If I have a data point that tells me that someone with a biography like mine
was named Super Bowl MVP, my Bayesian trust in that data point is going to be
pretty low.

