Shincho Bunko Shakespeare no Shoutai (Shakespeare's True Identity)

William Shakespeare's plays are enormously popular. However, many people have suspected that the uneducated Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon, who did not even attend university, cannot have written such wonderful plays which are based upon so much knowledge and wisdom. Doubts have been raised that some other learned person or persons wrote them under the pseudonym of "Shakespeare." Some believe that the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon would have been a likely candidate; others favor Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford; still others believe that the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who was supposedly dead at the time of "Shakespeare’s" appearance, was not actually dead. There is also a group theory and even the supposition that Queen Elizabeth was a member of the writing team.
 
This book explores the pros and cons for seven main candidates and will familiarize us with the details of the complicated relationships of the people during the Elizabethan era.
 
The book explores who the real "Shakespeare" was in the fashion of a detective story, but it does not aim to entertain. The exploration must be done cautiously, for the advocates for these theories are so convinced that some of them have founded academic societies in order to promote their arguments. Even Derek Jacobi, the renowned Shakespearean actor, publicly supports the Earl of Oxford theory. In the BBC's Shakespeare Uncovered, a DVD series that introduces Shakespeare's plays, Derek opines that the Shaxpere from Stratford, who did not so much as bequeath his own books, could not have been the author. To be sure, Shakespeare did not leave a single letter of his writing and he seems to have attempted to erase all traces of his existence. Why? The book also elucidates the darkness that covered the Elizabethan era.
This book attempts to clarify the huge misunderstanding surrounding Shakespeare's identity. It has been argued that the playwright Robert Greene attacked Shakespeare as the “upstart Crow" in his pamphlet "Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit," and this has been taken as fact by Shakespearean scholars. Nevertheless, the true identity of the “upstart Crow” would be Edward Alleyn, the famous and wealthy actor, who could have been generous enough to lend a small sum of money to Greene, who was in desperate need of it. Why, then, did we believe that it was Shakespeare?
 
The Shakespearean scholars' conviction about the identity of the “upstart Crow” turns out to be not so very different from the anti-Stratfordian beliefs regarding Shakespeare's identity. Therefore, we need to reevaluate the validity of those "facts" upon which we found our studies. Our doubts would be the starting point for the new study.
 

(Written by KAWAI Shoichiro, Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2019)