TILL BURNHAM WOOD DOTH MARCH TO HAVERTOWN?
I am shocked you would print the Commentary Page article by Warren Hope of Havertown, suggesting that the Earl of Oxford wrote the Shakespeare plays, without any indication of the many objections to the theory.
Francis Bacon might have been embarrassed to admit that he wrote anything so plebian, but the Earl of Oxford had already admitted the authorship of several bad plays. Why should he deny the authorship of good plays?
The author of the Shakespeare plays seems to have known no Roman writer but Plutarch and makes up Caesar's last words in church Latin. Oxford (like Bacon and Marlowe) had a college education and certainly knew that Suetonius records Caesar's last words, spoken in Greek, as "You, too, my son!"
Oxford (like Bacon) was a cultivated man. It is hard to imagine him penning Duchess Percy's obscene banter with her husband in King Henry IV.
The courtier, Oxford, should have known better than to place Marguerite of Anjou at the English court (in King Richard III) seven years after her exile and a year after her death.
The author of the plays knew English court procedure from the same sources that we do. He did not know the French court. The character of the dauphin in King Henry VI may be falsified for dramatic reasons. The court procedure seems falsified through ignorance. Oxford had been at the French court and knew better.
Oxford traveled widely on the continent. Would he have had the Turkish province of Illyria ruled by a Christian duke (in Twelfth Night)? Would he have given Bohemia a seacoast (in The Winter's Tale)?
The author of the Shakespeare plays was probably a professional actor with a grade school education. Will Shakespeare of Avon fits that description. We really don't know if his parents were literate or not. It makes little difference. Literacy is not a prerequisite for eloquence. We suspect that the great Indian poet Tulshidas was illiterate. We know Homer was illiterate.
Allen A. Smith
Media
HARDLY UNMOURNED
Warren Hope, in his piece favoring the Earl of Oxford as the author of Shakespeare's plays, believes that God-given genius cannot occur in the child of illiterate parents. This is a position of great snobbery and should not be tolerated by any right-thinking person.
