Why has there been so much controversy over the question of Shakespearean authorship over the last two centuries?
It’s because the more that has been discovered about William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, the less he seems to fit the measure of the author revealed to us in his plays and poetry. As a result, more and more people have begun to question the bona fides of the Stratford man.
Thousands of Shakespearean enthusiasts, but few academics, reject the traditional attribution of the works of Shakespeare to the Stratford-born man including such renowned figures as Henry James, Walt Whitman, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, David McCullough, Clifton Fadiman, Justice Harry Blackmun, Paul Nitze, John Galsworthy, Orson Welles, and Sigmund Freud.
But if William Shakespeare of Stratford did not write the plays and poems, who did? Over the years dozens of candidates have been proposed and their background and credentials thoroughly investigated.
In the past century Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, has become a leading candidate. Associate Justice John Paul Stephens (retired/2010) has written an essay, “The Shakespeare Canon of Statutory Construction,” in which he presents the unorthodox view that de Vere might be the true author of Shakespeare’s works.
If you are interested and cannot find Stephen’s essay, you may want to request a free copy by writing The Shakespeare Question, PO Box 7344, Greensboro 27417.