The play is the thing

My blog title is one of those quotes from Shakespeare that typically is taken out of context. I meant to say that it is the works themselves, not the author's identity, that really matter in Shakespeare. But now that I reach the actual quote in context in Hamlet, I see that it could be a pun:

The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

The play is a trap to see if Claudius truly is guilty of killing Hamlet's father, a kind of lie detector test. My wanting to reread the plays while studying the Oxford controversy belies my statement that it doesn't matter. If, in fact, I can read the plays with a new considering Oxford as the author, then it does matter. In a sense, the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the identity of the author.

The weakest link in the Oxfordian argument, I think, is that the poems and plays we know that Oxford wrote are of inferior quality and in a different style than those attributed to Shakespeare. The Oxfordians start to sound like Stratfordians when they deal with this argument: Well, the signed works are earlier and every writer matures, yada, yada, yada. I'm still willing to buy it, but this is definitely a caution for the whole theory.

Another weak link of course is the absence of any documentation or manuscript linking Oxford to the plays. All the evidence, such as it is, is circumstantial.

In short, while I'm easily convinced that Shakesper of Stratford did not write the plays, I'm willing to entertain that the real author was someone other than Oxford. I've just bought another book, North of Shakespeare by Dennis McCarthy, claiming that Sir Thomas North is the real author, so that should be interesting reading, too.