A Million dead poets would gladly attest - or would they?

In my view, the Shakespeare Authorship question is a tangled web that would probably take a lifetime to unravel in its entirety.

I was rather disheartened when I tried to find accounts of the matter which actually would have tried to remain objective. I'm still on a hunt for an author who's genuinely trying to find the truth, rather than trying to defend his or her respective candidate as the true Shakespeare.

But maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. Maybe you're not supposed to be objective. Maybe the only reason why anyone would be interested in the matter is that they actually care about who the author is.

Be that as it may, personally I still believe that you don't have to have a "favourite" candidate in order to be interested in the question. All this "bitter trench warfare", as it's been called, is entertaining and amusing in its own right.

I admit that my notion of "entertaining and amusing" may differ from the more generic meaning of those words. For instance, I couldn't resist a chuckle when I read the description of the Oxfordian Richard Whalen's 1994 book, Shakespeare - Who was he?. (There's an imaginative title for a book if I ever saw one.)

Let me quote whoever wrote the description:

Most intriguing are the many direct parallels between Oxford's life and Shakespeare's works, especially in Hamlet, the most autobiographical of the plays.

To elucidate the terminology for everyone: Oxfordians believe that Edward de Vere (1550-1604), the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare. Their candidate is usually called Oxford, though the man himself preferred to sign his letters as Oxenford. At least we know he had a sense of humour, or it's just another manifestation of the flexibility of Elizabethan spelling. Which is also one issue I must touch upon in the future.

So Hamlet, "the most autobiographical" of Shakespeare's plays. The "direct" parallels between the play and the earl's life are used as an argument on his behalf, because – here comes the gist of it – the play is the most autobiographical of them all.

Of course, whether a work is autobiographical or not can only be determined if you know who the author is. Please, please correct me if I'm wrong on this one! If I'm not, I've just found another ridiculous circular argument from the Oxfordian camp. (Not that the "orthodox" Shakespearians haven't excelled in that area for their part.)

To drive home the point of this post: even with a quick 5-minute search on the authorship question, you're bound to run into irrational, silly or just plain stupid arguments.

In countering the inevitably ensuing frustration from all that, my weapon is to make light of it. But even my sense of humour has its limits.

I was going to present a rough draft of all the issues that I'm going to cover in my forthcoming series on the authorship question. Turns out that instead, I was once again amused slash annoyed by an Oxfordian statement, and consequently thrown off course. This is going to be an interesting journey, I can tell.