Alias Shakespeare:  Solving The Greatest Literary Mystery Of All Time, by Joseph Sobran

As someone who has modestly contributed to the state of research relating to Shakespeare and the Atlantic history of the Anglo-American middle class of the 17th century [1], I have tended to view the authorship debate involving Shakespeare’s writings with a high degree of skepticism.  After all, those who affirm the scholarly consensus of William Shakespeare being the author of the plays that were published under his name (the Stratfordians) are surely right that those who critique their position are guilty of snobbery.  There is a great deal of snobbery present in this particular book, including the snobbery that only someone with the elite status of the author’s choice of Shakespeare identity would be able to acquire the sort of books that served as sources to Shakespeare’s plays, would have the sort of elite worldview that Shakespeare shows in his writings, and that William Shakespeare of Stratford was a near-illiterate who could not possibly have written works as insightful about human ways as the playwright was.  Snobbery can definitely be found here, but it is not clear that such snobbery is definitely wrong, not least when the author has written a worthy and intriguing defense of his snobbery here.

This book is a relatively short one at between 200 and 300 pages (depending on whether one reads the appendices, which are interesting) and presents an Oxfordian perspective on Shakespeare’s writings.  The first four chapters provide the author’s thoughts on a supposed “Shakespeare myth,” where the author talks about the life of William Shakespeare (who he continually labels as Shakspeare) (1), the origin of the connection between William Shakespeare and the plays that bear his name (2), the development of the biography, especially as it relates to the rather slim documentary material known about William Shakespeare of Stratford (3), and the disconnections that exist between the poetry and its perspective and the life of William Shakespeare (4).  The next six chapters provide the author’s case for his Oxfordian position, with chapters on the life of Oxford (5), the critical year of 1604, when Oxford died (6), Oxford’s social milieu (7), the connections that exist between Oxford’s circles and the plays (8), the sonnets revisited (9), and the reinvention of Shakespeare (10).  The book then finishes with five appendices that provide supplementary material of interest, including Mr. Shakespeare’s will (i), Oxford’s poems (ii) and letters (iii), the preface to Cardanus Comfort (4), and the funeral elegy (5), after which there are notes, works cited, acknowledgements, and an index.

There are at least a few obvious questions that a fair-minded reader would come to upon reading this book if they do not reject its thesis altogether.  For one, why would Oxford desire to have William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon to serve as a front man for his playwriting?  How ambivalent is Oxford’s position if he seeks to secure a son-in-law for his daughter who shows himself reluctant to marry and then ends up being involved in an awkward affair with the young man himself, thus risking both his reputation and his life?  Are we to assume that all post 1604 plays were either left incomplete or unperformed if Oxford died then and Shakespeare plays continued to be released until 1613?  What Shakespeare plays are to be considered as genuine?  Does such a concept have any meaning when we are dealing with such a complex identity game?  Why is there such a strong belief among many that a self-educated man of middle class origins cannot be an insightful judge of human nature and psychology?  Are we to ascribe this snobbery to anti-bourgeois attitudes and leave it at that?  One cannot examine the problem of Shakespeare and the authorship of his plays without examining some very deep and dark and meaningful problems that remain problems today.

[1] See, for example:

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