Shakespeare's Authorship

“To be, or not to be, that is the question:” whether Shakespeare is to be the real author of the great plays and sonnets credited to his name or if his name is to be only a cover up, a pen name, for the true author of the works, may it be Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, or a collection of authors (Shakespeare 127). Shakespeare’s work has been admired for centuries and it has gained much respect, however, some say the work of Shakespeare may in fact not be his. There are many questions surrounding the topic of Shakespeare’s authorship and whether or not he could have really been the author of so many thought provoking and diverse plays. There is great argument over his lack of proper schooling and travel, as well as there are many candidates

Freud read and admired many of Shakespeare’s works, Hamlet and Macbeth in particular. Looney provided a candidate for the authorship of the works since he did not believe in the collective authorship theory due to him not being able to believe that a playwright as accomplished as Shakespeare could have collaborated with lesser writers. However, Freud had trouble believing that a man from rural Stratford with little formal education could have accomplished so much himself. Likewise Freud did not believe Bacon could have accomplished it on his own because he believed that no single person could have had such a wide literary and philosophical range as well as he believed that “if Bacon had written the plays along with his great philosophical works, he ‘would have been the most powerful brain the world has ever produced’” (Shapiro 157). At first Freud strongly believed in the idea of many authors collaborating to write all these plays and sonnets, however, he lost that belief due to several trouble in his life surrounding his research and theories, and moved on to the belief that the Earl of Oxford was the true author of the Shakespearian works. Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, fit the profile well as he was a well educated man, who was well traveled , and many of the events in his life were similar to those in Shakespeare’s plays. Part of the reason as to how Looney arrived at the Earl of Oxford was that he began by setting a long list of traits and from there he began by analysing Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, which he found to be in the same form as another poem by none other than Edward de Vere. Looney knew nothing about the Earl of Oxford so in order to continue with his theory he became an expert on Edward de Vere and realized he not only fit all the criteria he had set, but his life was