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Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller and Supreme Court justices are all counted among those that don't believe the Bard of Avon wrote his own plays

Culture > Books Inside the Weird World of Shakespeare Conspiracy Theories Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller and Supreme Court justices are all counted among those that don't believe the hype By Lincoln Michel @TheLincoln August 9, 2019 9:33 am EDT (Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images) Getty Images You can’t escape William Shakespeare. You read his plays and poems in school and have seen his works adapted into everything from Disney films (The Lion King) to ’90s teen comedies (10 Things I Hate About You). You probably also regularly quote him without realizing it: phrases like “wild-goose chase,” “green-eyed monster” and “wear your heart on your sleeve” all owe their etymology to the playwright. For over four centuries, our comedies, tragedies and everything in between has in some way been influenced by The Bard of Avon. His work is so fixed into our shared cultural brain that it’s probably second only to the Bible in terms of how it has shaped our world. In 2019, when we seem to disagree on every subject, you might think that Shakespeare would be the one piece of common ground. But you’d be wrong. Last week, the New Yorker published an article about how the late Supreme Court justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia believed Shakespeare’s works were written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. In May, The Atlantic published “Was Shakespeare a Woman?”, an article by Elizabeth Winkler that proposed the aristocratic poet Emilia Bassano — despite admitting Bassno’s “writing style bears no obvious resemblance to Shakespeare’s.” Shakespare conspiracy theories are hardly new. Although no one is known to have contested Shakespeare’s authorship during his lifetime, controversy has swirled since at least the 19th century, when Henry James said he was “haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.” Later, Charlie Chaplin was adamant that the true author “had an aristocratic attitude” and wasn’t a glover’s son. Sigmund Freud, Malcolm X, Helen Keller and even Shakespearean (or “Shakespeareian”?) actors like Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance have all expressed doubts. So Long Lives This Conspiracy, and This Gives Life to Other Ones William Shakespeare, according to the actual evidence we have, was born to an illiterate glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564. He grew to become a celebrated actor and playwright who performed for royalty and was about as close to a rockstar as Elizabethan playwrights got. After he died, most of his works were collected and preserved in the First Folio. That was that … for a while. Until the 1800s, the debate was not about whether Shakespeare was a fraud, but rather whether he was really all that great. Ben Jonson and John Fletcher were generally thought to be superior in the centuries after his death. But critical evaluations shifted, as they are wont to do, and by the 19th century Shakespeare was becoming enshrined as the greatest English-language author of all time. Not long after, the theories began to come out of hiding. The history of Shakespeare conspiracy theories is almost as wacky as the theories themselves. It involves a host of crackpots and grifters, but also some of the world’s most celebrated minds. Sigmund Freud, for example, used Hamlet as part of his Oedipus Complex on the belief that Shakespeare wrote the play following the death of his father. After Frued learned it was probably written before, he switched to the Earl of Oxford theory of authorship. William Shakespeare taunting the non-believers. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images) Universal Images Group via Getty Another popular theory is that the better-educated playwright Christopher Marlowe was the true author. One problem? Marlowe died in 1593, long before Shakespeare’s most famous plays — like Hamlet, Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet — were published. The theory goes that Marlowe faked his own death to become “the Elizabethan James Bond” while also finding time to pen the greatest plays of all time. Marlowe, it seems, was really busy. Marlowe isn’t the only supposed author who wrote plays from beyond the grave. As James Shapiro, author of the excellent book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, noted about the Earl of Oxford theory: “Perhaps the greatest obstacle facing de Vere’s supporters is that he died in 1604, before 10 or so of Shakespeare’s plays were written.” As if covertly authoring the greatest plays of all time wasn’t enough, the Earl of Oxford theory is often spiced up with suggestions that he was also secretly the heir to the throne. Romantic, bizarre and implausible theories tend to attract people with, well, other strange beliefs. While researching this article, I stumbled across an Oxfordian’s blog in which the comments descended into a debate about whether Shakespeare was “‘inspired’ in some way by discarnate entities” or if he simply “had all the experience he needed from the king’s court a...