Shakespeare: The World as Stage

by Bill Bryson

“so strong a prop for so weak a burden” and its promise to “take advantage of all idle hours till I have honoured you with some graver labour,” is hardly the voice one would expect to find from a senior aristocrat, particularly one as proud as Oxford, to a junior one. There is also the unanswered question of why Oxford, patron of his own acting company, the Earl of Oxford’s Men, would write his best work for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a competing troupe. Then, too, there is the problem of explaining away the many textual references that point to William Shakespeare’s authorship—the pun on Anne Hathaway’s name in the sonnets, for example. Oxford was a sophisticated dissembler indeed if he embedded punning references to the wife of his front man in his work.