Our speculations about Shakespeare are almost as multifarious and foolish as our speculations about the maker of the universe, and, like those, are frequently concerned to establish that his works were not made by him but by another person of the same name.
The Mind of the Maker, pp. 56 – 57
Out of Babel 
Sounds like Sayers should have sat Derek Jacobi down and set him straight! I wish she would have….
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I just looked up what you mean.
I actually haven’t looked into this enough yet to reject the Oxfordian theory. I’ve been told by one person whose literary judgment I trust that there is a good case to be made for it.
But, I believe there were also deconstructionist schools of thought that “found” that Shakespeare’s works were written by multiple anonymous authors, just as they “find” the same about the books of the New Testament and so on. I’d turn Sayers loose on those folks any day.
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I don’t know the details either, except that Jacobi has been a very public proponent of saying Shakespeare didn’t write his plays.
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Yeah, I think there’s a big difference between just pulling the plays apart in a deconstructionist way, and arguing that they were all written by one person (which is obvious), but offering a candidate other than the William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, with reasons why this other person is a good candidate. I believe the Oxfordian theory is doing the latter. And, of course, even if we accept the theory, we would still call this other person Shakespeare when speaking about him as the author of the plays.
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Dang! Firing both barrels at once!
My wife and I love this!
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She’s great, isn’t she?
Sayers, I mean.
I’m sure you wife is great as well.
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Both, and yes!
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