My very first Conspiracy theory!

If you are anything like me, and I think you might be if you are reading this, I wonder what was the very first rabbit hole that you went down? In my case, it was about 25 years ago and it was on the vexed issue of the identity of the author(s) of the Shakespearean authorship question.

I remember reading a column by the late Joseph Sobran on the issue and that led me to his excellent primer “Alias Shakespeare” which has introduced many people to the thesis that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was the secret author of the works of William Shakespeare. I am one of these people - an “Oxfordian”!

Up until that point, like most people, I just went along with the traditional narrative that these magnificent works were somehow written by the simple grain-dealing man from Stratford that they called William Shakespeare. Yes, I have visited Stratford-upon-Avon and had the “Shakespeare” tour. What an industry has grown up around this myth and in order to sustain it we must turn a blind eye to the following truths!

Firstly, there is zero evidence that “William Shakespeare” could read or write! No letters or signed manuscripts written by “William Shakespeare” survives. The appearance of Shakespeare's six surviving authenticated signatures, which are characterised as "an illiterate scrawl", is interpreted as indicating that he was illiterate or barely literate.

Secondly he did not own any books. In his famous Will, he may have left his second best bed to his wife but he left zero traces of any of the requisite reference materials he would have used to construct his Plays. There is no evidence that he travelled to the Continent yet the works contain intimate references to several European cities. Most definitely SOMEBODY did travel there but it wasn’t the Stratford man!

The more I read into this mystery the more I became certain that “William Shakespeare” was not the author of the Sonnets and Plays. I remember reading an amazing tome on the story by J. Thomas Looney.

Again, like Sobran, Looney concluded that it was in fact the erudite rascal the Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere who had in fact written all these works. The evidence provided is overwhelming and it turns out that there are plenty of other people who accept this theory. These include;

Sigmund Freud

Jeremy Irons (Actor)

Sir Derek Jacobi (Actor)

Enoch Powell

Alexander Waugh

Michael York (Actor)

The startling conclusion that I arrived at was that the entire “Stratford Man wrote the works” is a gigantic literary hoax perpetrated by the very same sort of people who continue to hoax us on some many other issues. If they could get away with the Stratford fraud - and they have done a pretty good job of that for more than 400 years - what else could they get away with?