Why there is a Shakespeare Authorship Question

Official selection to the 2021 Montreal Independent Film Festival and 2021 Chicago Indie Film Awards, "Best Short Documentary." In addition, "Why there is a Shakespeare Authorship Question" was a finalist in the Dubai Independent Film Festival and Paris International Short Festival, a semi-finalist in the Dallas Movie Awards, Roma Shorts and Tokyo Shorts.

Most academic experts state, "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, period!" They claim there is no Shakespeare Authorship Question. Keir Cutler, PhD explains how looking at recent publications and statements by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Oxford University, and their current theories on collaboration, one can demonstrate there is a question as to who wrote the works of Shakespeare. The First Folio clearly states there is one writer, but modern experts are pushing a half dozen writers working with William of Stratford. This contradiction exposes a huge inconsistency and contradiction in the so-called expert thinking.

Keir Cutler has been writing and performing self-penned works that question the traditional biography of Shakespeare since 2002. He has performed at Shakespeare's Globe in London, England, Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Toronto Public Library, as well as at theatre and fringe festivals across Canada and the US. His adaptation of Mark Twain's "Is Shakespeare Dead?" and his monologue, "Shakespeare Crackpot" are available on YouTube.

In 2014, the Orlando Sentinel wrote the following in a review of Keir's work, "one must admit that his arguments are breathtakingly convincing and will leave you scrambling for your history books to verify what you’ve just heard. That Cutler’s show provokes us and challenges our cherished assumptions is a credit not just to the genius of the works of Shakespeare, regardless of who penned them, but to Cutler’s command of his topic and his audience."

[joekostka]

The lack of a literary paper trail combined with the six scrawled signatures combined with the Droeshout engraving having two left arms, combined with the Stratford Moniment [sic] combined with the original bust not being a writer combined with "look not on his picture, but his book" combined with "Avon" being Hampton Court combined with "Stay passenger..." combined with Vere's Geneva Bible combined with "our English Terence" combined with ""our ever-living poet" combined with Golding's unlikely translation of Metamorphoses combined with hundreds of other items of evidence indicating that the Stratford businessman is not the author and pointing to Vere, I am inclined to believe that Da Vinci did not learn about painting Mona Lisa nor Michelangelo learn how to sculpt David by sitting around in a pub yucking it up with the guys as Stratfordian entrepreneurs would have us believe.

[winsur]

I really enjoy these videos by Keir Cutler. I come back and visit the "Shakespeare Authorship" videos periodically to see what is new. Keir Cutler's are my favorites. My mother introduced me to Shakespeare when I was 10 in 1959. One Christmas, she gave me the latest biography of Shakespeare. I was surprised that nearly all the biography was about the life and times of Shakespeare, not the man. Later, after reading “Alias Shakespeare", I became convinced that there was something up concerning authorship of the plays and poetry. Afterward, I spent many an hour arguing with my mother about the authorship. I never got her to budge. I gradually have concluded that the Duke of Oxford was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth to outline, and oversea the construction and writing of most if not all the plays. The sonnets and other poetry were likely his. This hypothesis provides a layer of protection they needed, and for the many Elizabethan writers involved.

[EVUK-bdvn]

One key but too-rarely mentioned reason to believe a woman or women wrote some/all of the plays is that women had to hide behind a (male) pseudonym given that women were not permitted to write plays and have them publicly performed except as "closet" playwrights. The only truly balanced non-chauvinist conclusion is that a male and female "Shakespeare Salon" including de Vere, Mary Sidney, Amelia Bassano had some great fun covertly writing but probably not co-writing all of the plays. Actors, theatre owners and play commissioners would have attended those semi-clandestine Shakespeare salon sessions for initial read-throughs and as with movie screenplays minor or major changes would inevitably have been proposed by all involved.
Paul G

[guitarslim]

I believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. But who was Shakespeare?

[jamesbassett]

All this rationalism and actual historic research combined with critical thinking is starting to get on the high priests' nerves. This is made even more apparent by their shrill tone and snarkiness. They are standing on quicksand and they know it!

[HigherChannel]

Of course, it is much more convenient to suggest that many plays were not by Shakespeare in order to sanitise the glaring question of authorship, i.e that they were not written by the Stratford man in the first place, because that nulls the centuries of works written about Stratford man. When I did my undergrad at Cambridge, there was one thing that we were never to say out loud, and that is:
"I don't know", the shaming would follow on a most embarrassing scale. So, fabrication was more acceptable, but not knowing was not. So, imagine that suddenly Cambridge University has to concede that the whole institution was "in not knowing" for centuries, by promoting Stratford man as Shakespeare?
I think orthodox academia will have to transform radically or die, and become a museum, and it is their choice. I hope they read this comment.

[ernestjohn]

Powerful video. A must see for anyone interested in Shakespeare

[UtubeAW]

Edward De Vere was “William Shakespeare.”

[hogweed]

Regardless of what conclusions or opinions one has on this debate, it's faintly depressing that it's STILL such hard work to convince certain quarters that questions have every right to even be asked in the first place.

Keep up the good work, Keir :).

[somerledislay]

francis bacon shake spear has occult connotations

[dawnbartle]

Great to see a new upload on this topic apart from unending codes and other mind boggling themes…. Lord have mercy (minus the seat)

[martynhanson]

I hope you get the point I'm making but before Orson Welles directed Citizen Kane in 1941 the person who got the credit for a film was the producer. For example, in 1939 Victor Fleming directed two humongous projects in the shape of Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz, but who has even heard of Fleming today?

[skeshavarz]

I have a question: Why some people get very angry when you ask them about Shakespeare Authorship Question? Several times I was chatting on social media with a few people about this subject and they got so offended and angry and called me stupid and imbecile and told me I shouldn't say such nonsense and I am not an expert so I have no right to comment on this subject! I don't understand why they insult a person who just asks a question?

[uncatila]

I have penned a poem or two
though most of them are dogs
hounding paths to love that's new
in mysts and rain and fogs
Me thinks I did speak poorly though
both time and time again
if I did not speak sweet to you
my long lost holy friend
while Shakespeare waits in fashion's tomb
and Marlow speaks behind
Just beyond the curtain
Le nome de Plume sublime
I would stoop to ape the bard
If it would bring her back
That girl that was my Isabel
In this twelfth Night of my lack

[tinahamilton]

Thank you. You’ve helped reawaken my involvement with this issue. I gave it up when I had to move to Pittsburgh.
Not a lot of interest here. I’m hoping to escape…and wake.
Your presentations are an excellent review for me, I hope an intriguing introduction for others.

[jschiek]

Thank you for this great and compelling content. I’ve only very recently become obsessed with the Shakespeare Authorship Question. Your arguments, while often very humorous, don’t stray from logic and bare facts. My introduction came through Alexander Waugh, who, though a staunch supporter of the question and ardent Oxfordian, seems to have sacrificed a lot of his own logical deduction in chasing out very strange information from the First Folio. The idea of Shakespeare being something of an anonymized brand and catch all for gentlemen poets and playwrights of the day makes a lot of sense when considering the broad scope of Shakespeare’s breadth of knowledge and reading. I’m inferring here as much as any existing Stratfordian, but it makes more sense for that knowledge to have come from a collective than a singular—and singularly unlikely—Warwickshire bumpkin. No offense to Warwickshire bumpkins of this or any other age.

[evukelectricvehicles]

Odd isn't it that the fact that women had one major additional reason to hide their identities often strangely goes unmentioned: women were still not permitted to write plays in ostensibly enlightened and liberal Elizabethan England. By contrast the fact that women were not permitted to *act* in plays in English theatres is widely known and freely discussed.
Paul G

[joecurran]

Also, if everyone knew this Stratford chap was actually Shakespeare, how could he write for example Richard II, where the King literally gives away his crown and not get arrested? It's honestly laughable.

[ethelburga]

"Either one believes Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare or there were an unknown number of collaborators" that's the pivotal canard here. Shakespeare authorship study is revealing hitherto unsuspected contributions by other Bankside playwrights as more sophisticated stylometric analysis is able to tackle smaller and smaller fragments. But the identical process has completely deflated the claims of alternative authors of the entire canon which have now moved along the authorship spectrum from the familiar territory of "preposterous" to their new home in the realms of "impossibility".

Yes there are parts of the early and late plays, and even Macbeth, which contain additions by other playwrights but it is both absurd and disingenuous to suggest that this has created new space for followers of The Earl of Oxford or Bacon to explore. The opposite has happened. Better stylometric analysis has reduced the probability of candidates to effective elimination.

The Shakespeare Authorship Question, where that implies the existence of potential alternative candidates for the whole canon (minus a couple of percent in collaborative additions), no longer exists. It is a parlour game for contrarians.

[TheLenze]

Thanks for this. You are one of the best to explain this issue in the popular vein. Another issue to popularize is the requirement of evidence and what constitutes evidence. The Strafordians always like to lurk in the vague shadows of maybe and suppose and could have.