Renaissance courtiers were all poets to some degree. An original poem beautifully copied was the favored response to any situation, forerunners of our modern greeting cards. It was publishing that was disdained. Until Oxford, Bacon and Mary Sidney (who all published under pseudonyms), Court poets wrote only for internal consumption.

Argument from silence:
“As for writing, we find no letters from him to anyone on any subject much less literature”
You are aware that the surviving letters of Oxford have NO reference to literature.
If you discredit Will from Stratford based on the lack of letters so ceratinly none on literature, you SHOULD discredit Oxford even more because there are over 60 letters by him and NONE of them deal with literature…

And theater may have been ‘not done’ for courtiers, but poems surely since Elizabeth herself wrote and enjoyed them would not object… the style of writing of the poems and the plays is too similar to attribute them to different writers…
I wonder…

Puns can take many forms, some are really stupid while others can be dazzlingly complex and meaningful. Like poems written to a particular beat with alliteration and rhymes, they are a form of wordcraft, so most writers and all poets are sensitive to them. Sometimes, when they occur naturally, they have to be avoided, because a pun almost always functions as a saboteur, throwing a wrench into a smooth running discourse, which is not always desirable. The penchant for pun names for characters in English plays and novels is obvious.

By using a pen name a writer can be seen as turning his (or her) authorship into a semi-fictional character, though which they can assume a particular authorial identity, different from the one they would show if writing under their real names. This is even more true of pun names, since a pun signifies ludi, Latin for jokes or games (as in ludicrous). It says, don’t take me too seriously; we’re here to have fun.

The theory that Oxford chose William of Stratford because of the punnable qualities inherent in his name (that is, if spelled so it could be pronounced Shake-spear) is largely based on the theory that he was also the power behind the Robert Greene persona. Robert Greene had “died” in September of 1592, so by April of 1593, when Oxford was anxious to get Venus and Adonis in the bookstalls, he was still without a pen name. Robert Greene was a very ordinary name, but it did convey an allusion to the Green Man, a folk character closely related to holiday mumming and disguising, while the word green in French was/is vere. It was important the the name not be too obviously a pun, so Shakespeare was ideal.

Though not an ordinary name, Shakespeare was common enough that its punning nature would not be obvious. And that the first name was William was an added plus, since that allowed a more complex reading: Will shake spear. The fact that William was illiterate (and so could not make an attempt to pass his own awful verse off under the same name); that his hometown was so far from London (two days ride by horse, requiring a stopover in Oxford); and that his family was obviously dependent on what stipend the Lord Chamberlain’s Men gave him, were all just so much gravy.

In 1595, the problem for Oxford and his patrons was less to confront questions about his authorship than to see to it that such questions didn’t spread. The real William Shakespeare was an unknown in London. When he was there he was just another face in the crowd, and as the record suggests, he wasn’t there very often or for very long. Nevertheless, should someone go looking for him, they could find him if they didn’t mind the long trip to Stratford. And William himself, as John Aubrey’s anecdote suggests, was well aware that he had to be prepared to turn aside any challenge to show his writing skills, so it’s clear that somebody, more than one perhaps, did seek him out.

Would it not have been obvious to almost everyone in the know that a man like William of Stratford who had little or no education could not possibly have written those plays?

Y0u reviewed my webquest and marveled that it be taught at the secondary ed level, so I thought I should let you know that it’s not. It was an assignment for an EDTECH teaching class. I, too, am a longtime Oxfordian. 12 years. I have written one movie THE GREATEST STORY NEVER TOLD, which I’m trying to sell and I’m writing a book. I think you’ll like my title. AS YOU DON’T LIKE IT.
In it, I decode the debate, using the play As You Like It.

Love your site, keep trucking.

jeff rowe