Thank You, Professor Barkan

Thank you for your response to Richard M. Waugaman ’70’s assertion that the Earl of Oxford secretly wrote all of Shakespeare’s work (not to mention translations of Ovid and Boccaccio). I find that all of the “scholars” who have selected other authors to take Shakespeare’s place eventually become hyperbolic in scope. A more recent candidate for the Shakespeare authorship is Thomas North, who in addition to his translation of Plutarch’s Lives, is supposed to have written all of Shakespeare’s work based upon North’s own life experiences, and then supposedly sold these plays to Shakespeare at the beginning of Shakespeare’s career. (See North by Shakespeare by Michael Blanding, referencing the theory of Dennis McCarthy.) The Oxfordians and others seem to discount the contemporary evidence for Shakespeare’s authorship, e.g., the journal entries by Ben Jonson, and would rather rely on coincidental correspondences that can never be proven or disproven. How do we know that the Earl of Oxford didn’t steal this Bible from Shakespeare?