The reason that the sonnets, in particular, have kickstarted the thorny authorship question on this blog is because of the tireless work done by one Hank Wittemore — a man who seems determined to singlehandedly close the case that Edward de Vere is the true author of Shakespeare’s works.
I can only imagine the ungodly number of hours he’s put into this dogged pursuit. It would exhaust me just to finish the impressive tome he wrote expounding his theory. (You can find it HERE). I’m tempted to learn more about this thesis… but then I’d still probably end up sounding half-assed about an important subject better left to somebody who actually knows what they’re talking about.
You can visit Mr. Wittemore’s blog HERE.
From what I understand, the case for de Vere has crescendoed to that classic tipping point when it launches a Hollywood movie. It will be called “Anonymous” and was directed by Rolland Emmerich. That plot has been summarized on iMDB as follows:
A political thriller about who actually wrote the plays of William Shakespeare– Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford– set against the backdrop of the succession of Queen Elizabeth I, and the Essex Rebellion against her.
Of course that tidy teaser makes it sound as if the case were already closed… which it decidedly is not.
Here is a different sort of summary by Raven Clabough (which, ironically, I too will summarize) that uses the occasion of a new book on Marlowe to survey the field:
In The Marlow-Shakespeare Connection: A New Study of the Authorship Question, Samuel Blumenfeld undertakes the difficult task of proving an alternative author to the Shakespeare canon: Christopher Marlowe. The Shakespeare authorship controversy began in 1781, when English clergyman Reverend James Wilmot claimed that Shakespeare, uneducated and inexperienced, was incapable of writing the greatest literary works of all time.
…The Marlovian theory, that which claims Christopher Marlowe to be the true author of the Shakespeare canon, dates back as early as 1895….
Blumenfeld…raises several interesting questions. For example, some of Shakespeare’s plays, including the Henry VI triad and Richard III, were much shorter in their Quarto versions than in the First Folio, published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. This leaves Stratfordians with a difficult question to answer: Who revised the plays? Blumenfeld answers this by claiming that Marlowe was still alive, even after Shakespeare had died. Marlowe, being the author of the plays according to Blumenfeld, would be the only reasonable person qualified to edit his own works.
You sorta get the idea why I didn’t want to open my trap. Yet I’m still going on record as attempting to read the sonnets with what in the East they call “beginner’s mind.”
Easy for me to do, if you couldn’t tell.
A Year of Shakespeare 