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Comment by yetanotherloser | Hacker News Reader

What a snobby argument!

Try Charles Nicholl's The Lodger for a pretty detailed study that leaves little room for doubt about the fellow from Stratford.

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Try the very short biography by Bill Bryson, the central point of which is how little historical evidence of anything to do with Shakespeare actually exists and the ludicrous ammount of speculation over the years by various hunch holders. I also like the 1987 moot court considering 17th Earl of Oxford arguments in front of then sitting Supreme Court Justices: William Brennan, Harry Blackmun, and John Paul Stevens [1]

[1] https://www.c-span.org/video/?618-1/

A "snobby" argument I think would be one that doesn't even bother attempting a counterargument but instead furnishes innuendo and dismissal based on an implicit claim of superior authority.

Well, there is a lot of scholarship refuting the snobby argument, including the book referenced in the reply. "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" covers this too, with lots of analysis of back and forth competitive poetry and passages between Shakespeare and contemporary playwrights like Marlowe, who knew Shakespeare well. Seems odd to imagine that they would also be involved in a coverup.

Thanks for the recommendation, I think it's in my tsundoku somewhere. What I liked about The Lodger was that it doesn't go on about authorship at all, just painstakingly reconstructs a time, a place and a life and leaves a picture convincing enough that it really leaves some speculation looking rather daft.

This is such an old and discredited argument that it literally turns up in Ben Elton’s Shakespeare sitcom as something to be parodied; it’s probably not deserving of much of a counter argument. Like, it’s more or less a conspiracy theory at this stage.

The one where Elton scientifically proves that Shakespeare also wrote Marlowe's plays?

You need to provide an argument before anyone can provide a counterargument! What specific parts of Shakespeares work couldn’t plausibly have been authored by someone with his background and education?

You might as well be asking them to argue that the moon landing was real.

The anti-Stratfordians have absolutely no evidence other than speculation and snobbery.

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