i feel like people have forgotten how to be a generous audience when they read/watch something. like sometimes you have to buy into some bullshit plot points or a deus ex machina or a few loopholes as the price of admission for an otherwise fun time. sometimes these things are just gears that get us to where the story really wants to be, and too many people get caught up in those gears. sometimes you gotta meet a story halfway.
Anti-Stratfordians are people who believe that William Shakespeare didn’t write the works attributed to him. They usually argue that it was some more highly educated or aristocratic author like the Earl of Oxford or Sir Francis Bacon who hid behind the identity of Shakespeare, and that Shakespeare, a middle-class man with a grammar school education, wouldn’t have known enough to write some of the greatest plays of all time.
If you can’t tell from my description, it’s a theory very much based on classism, and it’s considered pretty fringe and ridiculous by most Shakespeare scholars since the evidence is pretty weak. But apparently some people on the internet are still spreading it! It drives me crazy.
They’re called anti-Stratfordians because Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, but they don’t believe the man from Stratford was the actual writer. I don’t think “Stratfordian” is really used though, I’ve never heard it.
Adding some more Important Parts of the debate to this for those who don’t know much about it:
A “grammar school” education wasn’t just teaching grammar. It would have involved a lot of literary study, particularly regarding the classics that Shakespeare took obvious inspiration from. This actually would have been considered a pretty good education at the time.
Theatre wasn’t really a prestigious thing! Yes, by this point it was gaining in popularity in England and theatre companies generally had wealthy patrons, but it carried…less-than-high-class connotations. Audiences were often boisterous and loud, tickets were cheap, and the whole crossdressing thing made theatre taboo in some circles. So being a successful playwright wasn’t really something that was solely the territory of wealthy, university-educated men.
The above points go to show that not only is anti-Stratfordianism extremely classist, the classist arguments aren’t even good.
William Shakespeare was a businessman–that we know for certain. The business dealings for which we have records (or can confidently infer information about) are perfectly in line with the author being William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon.
Shakespeare’s plays actually have quite a few errors in them. Take a Shakespeare edition with decent footnotes (the Norton is particularly good for this); your author will likely leave notes about how Shakespeare is using weird information or may have just straight-up forgotten something established in an earlier scene. Ben Jonson famously described Shakespeare as having “small Latin and less Greek.” Note: knowing Latin was an essential for many early modern writers, particularly those of *prestige*.
To reiterate @suits-of-woe’s point: almost no actual scholar believes anti-Stratfordian theories. The only reason these theories have traction is because certain celebrities and all our English teachers like to bring them up like they’re some fascinating secret.
So, yeah, anti-Stratfordianism is annoying and inaccurate. Shameless conspiracy theories.
I’d add that Shakespeare’s Latin was, by modern standards, extremely good because that was all you studied in grammar school – you studied Latin and rhetoric eight to eleven hours a day, five or six days a week. The idea was to prepare you for university study, which was conducted entirely in Latin. An aristocratic boy, on the other hand, might have had two hours of Latin a day; his education spent a lot more time on the physical and social requirements of his rank, whereas grammar school boys tended to be middle-class and upwardly mobile and thus needed education to achieve this in a way that noble boys wouldn’t (they were also likely to get more out of a university education, whereas young aristocrats who attended the universities tended to be there for social reasons and to fuck around). There were, of course, highly educated members of the nobility, but they were educated because they wanted to be, not because their education in childhood was intrinsically better. The Earl of Oxford’s letters show that he retained little of the Latin he learned as a boy, and his tutor infamously wrote that he was pretty much done trying to teach the thirteen-year-old earl, so he clearly wasn’t one of those. True believers in his authorship will tell you he had degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, but they won’t tell you they were honorary degrees awarded to everyone in the queen’s entourage when she visited.
Ben Jonson, incidentally, didn’t go to university either; he was accepted to Cambridge but couldn’t attend for financial reasons. He was a very learned man and, importantly for this topic, an autodidact. He writes about Shakespeare as someone who is clearly a professional rival–because that’s who wrote plays, professional writers–but someone he seems to be on friendly terms with personally as a social equal. As such, he is the key figure in any antistratfordian argument, because they all require him to be in on the secret. But Jonson was also an inveterate gossip and the star of the first liveblog, in the form of Scottish poet William Drummond’s notes from a visit Jonson paid him in 1619 (long after Oxford’s death and a few years after Shakespeare’s). Jonson gives his opinions on pretty much everything, including a bunch of fellow poets and people he knew from hanging around at court. He’s even willing to gossip about Queen Elizabeth’s supposed gynecological problems, and yet we’re to believe he still managed to say nothing about Shakespeare’s identity if there were actually something to say? This completely beggars belief.
I was watching a new historical drama on Netflix today and I legitimately sent this message to my friend with no proper context:
“Handles?? On teacups?? In the 1720s?? Fools!!!!”
AND ANOTHER THING, the stemware on this show is ALL WRONG! Where are the heavy knops with the bubbles? Why are the bowls so large in proportion to the stems? Where are the thick balusters? This is mid-19th C stemware teleported onto an early 18th C table!
That is the funny thing about archaeology specialities. My friend and I both specialize in different things so when we watch historical films we get irritated by different things.
“This type of stoneware was NOT used in this era, it’s like 100 years too early!”
“This is supposed to be winter during the Little Ice Age, why is the weather so nice and sunny. Why is no one ice skating???”
Yeah they’re also using way too many high-quality candles all the time instead of rush lights or something more conservative (who’s paying for this???), and there’s a bride in a white wedding dress over 100 years before Queen Victoria made that a thing. (Honestly though I really enjoyed the show and to my casual eye they did a pretty good job on the costumes. Some of the silverware looked a bit off, but a lot of the crockery looked okay.)
Coming on this post again to comment that when they made sugar dough on this show, they made it with white granulated sugar. In 1720. Where is the giant cone of cane sugar (the sugarloaf)? Where are the sugar nips?? I just want to see them use sugar nips!!
depression or whatever is soooo embarrassing oops i ruined a large chunk of my future because i just didn’t feel like doing anything for a while . Epic Cringe babe…
• "You are a benevolent angel of Richardbanging." – Aris Merquoni
• "you are the mistress of depraved glittering asshole royalty" –fiftysevenacademics
lea | 42 | midwestern u.s. | she, her
I don't follow people under 18; I try to tag for common triggers and adultish content. (You can't make me use the citrus scale though.)
And with the shoutyng, whan the song was do
That foules maden at here flyght awey,
I wok, and othere bokes tok me to,
To reede upon, and yit I rede alwey.
I hope, ywis, to rede so som day
That I shal mete some thyng for to fare
The bet, and thus to rede I nyl nat spare.
– Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parlement of Fowles
