I didn’t mean to imply you all had leprosy, Roger – just that you form a kind of party or faction (although you do sometimes resemble pod people). And I agree that those of us interested in the many references Shakespeare’s plays make to their contemporary political context owe the Oxfordians et al a great debt of gratitude. Your passionate conviction that Shakespeare must be someone else has spurred you on to uncover a great deal of evidence that would otherwise lie hidden.

But as with most evidence, there are more ways than one to interpret it. I’m just trying to speak up for one that hasn’t been given quite so much attention.

And when it comes right down to it – I think our own prejudices always color our interpretation, and push us toward conclusions that reinforce our more deeply held beliefs – especially on matters like this, where it’s hardly possible to reproduce the experiment and apply a truly scientific method. Certainly my own desire to believe that radical, democratic political change could again arise from grassroots action colors my interpretations of this period – even if the Obama administration has so far been proving just the opposite. I look for evidence of what I’d like to see happen now happening then.

And so other people desire the best English poet of all time to be more nobly born than he seems to have been, and others wish to see flattering one’s betters to achieve success as something that even Shakespeare was not above, and still others like Bill Cain want Shakespeare to be Shakespeare – as long as he’s a closet Catholic.

It’s kind of like Pascal’s wager. But there’s always an anti-Pascal wager to counter it .

Confidentially, my own favorite answer to the authorship question is that I myself am Shakespeare – or rather, that Shakespeare was my Elizabethan incarnation – and that our lineage includes James Joyce, Thoreau, Jane Austen, Jesus (in his human character – I can’t speak for the divine), the woman who composed Homer’s Odyssey, and Moses, and consists of men and women of much more talent than their relatively humble origins and disdain for the prevailing social and political hierarchy typically allow them scope, so that not always does the world take much note of me:

Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness:
thou shalt hold the opinion of Pythagoras ere I will
allow of thy wits, and fear to kill a woodcock, lest
thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam. Fare thee well.

Hence if anyone alive today knows what Shakespeare probably intended when he wrote a play or poem, it’s gonna be me. And I couldn’t care a fig for anyone who thinks my Shakespeare incarnation too low born and uneducated to write my own work:

He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in the sonnets where there is Will in overplus. Like John O’Gaunt his name is dear to him, as dear as the coat and crest he toadied for, on a bend sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than his glory of greatest shakescene in the country. What’s in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours. A star, a daystar, a firedrake rose at his birth. It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars. His eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as he walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight, returning from Shottery and from her arms.

Another theory is that I am destined to become Shakespeare after the singularity happens, when we humans who finally become immortal discover that history goes backwards as well as forwards, and that Shakespeare will never exist unless I travel back in time and pretend to be him. As I said in the incarnation that wrote Ulysses, “He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.” So it’s no wonder there is very little documentary evidence of his existence – I was incognito, and didn’t want to leave much of a paper trail.

Or was that the plot of a Star Trek episode?

Those interested in such questions would do well to check out the links Roger provides, though I’d advise retaining a healthy skepticism until you find yourselves truly convinced – or even better, come up with a new theory to account for the evidence yourself. If you do come up a new theory – please post it here. I’ll be checking the links out too, to challenge or validate my own conclusions – which are always provisional, and may change after I consider something I didn’t know before.

Thanks for the pointers, Roger.