Controversy Over "Who Wrote Shakespeare?"

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William Shakespeare has been known to be one of the best and well-known poets and play writers, but is he the one who truly wrote all of the works? Everyone, up to 1857, thought that Shakespeare was Shakespeare and no one questioned it. But, Delia Salter Bacon published a story called The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, in which she says that other people might have been the author of the plays in which Shakespeare got credit for. The Oxfordian theory discusses that Edward de Vere, or the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays and poems originally accredited to Shakespeare. The first proposed theory of this was by John Thomas Looney in 1920, as saying that Vere would be the more probable contestant for the writings than any other alternative. The case that Shakespeare-Oxford Society makes about this theory is based on historical interpretations, literary matches, and plots and characters in each story. In the poem Venus and Adonis, the line “first heir of my invention,” is only stated in consistency in the poetry of Edward de Vere in the 16th century. Also in reference to Venus and Adonis, the poem indicated knowledge of Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, since Venus and Adonis translated many lines of Ovid omitted by Golding. This is relevant because Golding was Earl of Oxford’s uncle. Another parallel is in Hamlet referring to Polonius when “young men falling out at tennis” may reference the infamous Oxford-Sidney tennis-court quarrel. It is also said, by the students of Oxford, that the details in Hamlet are so similar to those of Oxford’s life that it could be considered an autobiography. A Washington Post reporter, Don Oldenburg, wrote of Oxford’s life reading as a “rough draft” of Hamlet. The thing that puzzles students of Shakespeare is the knowledge Shakespeare had of Italy, even though he had never traveled farther from
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