The Shakespeare Authorship Page Dedicated to the Proposition that Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare Contents Times Introduction How We Know that Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare ... Bardlinks Elsewhere on the Web To the New York Times The Times published a strongly pro-Oxfordian piece on February 10, 2002, that fell far short of the standards we expect from the "paper of record." See our response to the Times Introduction Many books and articles have been written arguing that someone other than William Shakespeare, the glover's son from Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote the plays and poems published under his name. There exist sincere and intelligent people who believe there is strong evidence that Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was the author of these plays and poems. Yet professional Shakespeare scholars those whose job it is to study, write, and teach about Shakespeare generally find Oxfordian claims to be groundless, often not even worth discussing. Why is this? Oxfordians claim that these scholars are blinded to the evidence by a vested self-interest in preserving the authorship of "the Stratford Man," and some more extreme Oxfordians claim that there is an active conspiracy among orthodox scholars to suppress pro-Oxford evidence and keep it from the attention of the general public. The truth, however, is far more prosaic. Oxfordians are not taken seriously by the Shakespeare establishment because (with few exceptions) they do not follow basic standards of scholarship, and the "evidence" they present for their fantastic scenarios is either distorted, taken out of context, or flat-out false. | |
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