The Shakespearean Canon and the Question of Attribution

 

The Shakespearean Canon and the Question of Attribution

Posthumous portrait of William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604)

In considering the Shakespearean corpus more than four centuries after its first circulation, literary, historical, and epistemological analyses must be articulated through a clear distinction between what the Stratfordian position can legitimately sustain on the basis of surviving documentation, theatrical practices, early modern conventions of authorship, and contemporaneous testimony, and what the Oxfordian position, inaugurated by Thomas Looney’s Shakespeare Identified, has progressively developed through arguments of biographical congruence, courtly and humanist literacy, legal and linguistic competence, and the dense correspondence between lived experience and textual structure. Neither position should be reduced to polemic or apology, nor distorted through selective emphasis.

The Stratfordian model must be treated as the historically dominant and partly mythopoetic explanatory framework, supported by title pages, the First Folio, and the scant testimony of contemporaries operating within a theatrical economy that did not require modern notions of authorial transparency or personal self-exposure. At the same time, its silences, improbabilities, and unresolved gaps must be acknowledged without attenuation, especially where the documentary record fails to account for the intellectual, educational, and experiential complexity presupposed by the canon. The Oxfordian model, by contrast, must be examined as a coherent alternative hypothesis and evaluated in terms of cumulative plausibility, internal consistency, and explanatory power, particularly at those points where it provides a more economical explanation of the education, legal mastery, classical saturation, aristocratic psychology, and political reticence that run through the works.

What must be avoided is a naïve positivism that treats the Stratfordian attribution as a closed historical fact simply because it has been institutionalized through repetition, pedagogy, and cultural inertia.

The only elements that are certain are the texts, none of which, however, exists or has come down to us in manuscript form bearing the autograph handwriting of its author. It is therefore necessary to distinguish with sobriety between a functional or basic literacy attributable to William Shakespeare and the very high level of elite humanist education associated with Oxford, especially when measured in light of the level of intellectual preparation, philosophical breadth, and cultural memory presupposed by the Shakespearean corpus.

The guiding principle of inquiry must therefore be proportionality, according to which assertions are commensurate with the evidence, correlations are distinguished from demonstrations, and the absence of proof is neither inflated into proof of absence nor dismissed as irrelevant.

In the exercise of historiographical caution, balance must be understood and accepted not as a gesture of diplomatic or analytic neutrality, but rather as a disciplined critical posture, grounded in the recognition of evidentiary asymmetry and in a constant commitment to methodological fairness. Such a posture does not presuppose the equivalence of competing hypotheses, nor does it aim at their premature reconciliation, but instead tends to measure each explanatory model in relation to the nature, density, and limits of the evidence on which it rests.

The question of who the writer who signed his works as “William Shakespeare” truly was must therefore be addressed as an open historical problem, and certainly not as a definitively resolved identity.

The intellectually most responsible position today is one that allows competing models to be tested against the canon itself, the cultural and political conditions that produced it, and the epistemic limits imposed by temporal distance, archival loss, and the non-modern nature of early modern authorship, without recourse to veneration, removal, or premature closure.