What first attracted my attention to the identity question — the Authorship Question — , now many years ago, was the fact that the works were written resoundingly from the perspective of a member of the English upper classes – likely a member of the nobility but definitely of the upper classes. I have pressed home the fact that English commoners, like William Shakspere of Stratford, are often portrayed as comical bumpkins.
In the comedies, in particular, the malapropisms that compose the speeches of the man of the lower classes are hilarious, as when Dogberry calls for a transcriptionist, in the play Much Adoe About Nothing, in order to “set down our excommunication”. Or when Constable Elbow, in Measure for Measure, threatens an “action of battery” against a tapster who says he “respected” his wife before they were married. In the histories and tragedies, however, the matter is more serious and men of the lower classes take the part of henchmen and murderers.
At the same time, those on the literary-political left who do not question the Stratford man as the author, have grown steadily more strident rejecting his derisive depiction of those English commoners — and virtually everything else in his work, his biography and his legacy. For my part, I have averred that, if the Stratford man wrote the plays, surely he was a traitor to his class.
These are not new observations. As early as the mid-19th century, Walt Whitman deplored Shakespeare's lack of democratic principals.
The great poems, Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of Democracy.1
Nevertheless, he cannot help but lavish praise upon the playwright. His awe almost overwhelms his point.
He seems to me of astral genius, first class, entirely fit for feudalism. His contributions, especially to the literature of the passions, are immense, forever dear to humanity and his name is always to be reverenced in America. But there is much in him that is offensive to Democracy. He is not only the tally of Feudalism, but I should say Shakespeare is incarnated, uncompromising Feudalism, in literature.2
Few descriptions from the progressive literary-political perspective get the balance so precisely right. Leo Tolstoy, still further to the left in his social agenda, to the point that it was all of his perspective, could not understand how so poor an author had ever gotten so high a reputation.
In the appendix to the English translation of Tolstoy's thoughts on Shakespeare, Ernest Crosby makes the positive point.
A glance at Shakespeare's lists of dramatis personae is sufficient to show that he was unable to conceive of any situation rising to the dignity of tragedy in other than royal and ducal circles.3
Some ten years later, Albert Tolman's more meticulous “Is Shakespeare Aristocratic?” appeared in the PMLA4, with detail which illustrates Crosby's point. Foremost, he cites numerous occasions when Shakespeare's source for a play, about a peasant uprising, gave a balanced view of the issues involved the peasant side of which the playwright left out 'apparently because the author is "unable to conceive a popular uprising in any other terms than the outbreak of a mob."'5
But the difficulty of making this all square with the Stratford man as heavily biased toward the aristocracy trips Tolman up at one key point, as well. He cites the play Henry VI, Part 2, to show that Shakespeare also had a “a disbelief in the middle classes.” The passage he cites from Jack Cade's rebellion in the play makes the true point which is entirely different.
Clerk. Sir, I thank God, I have been so well brought up that I
can write my name.
All. He hath confessed: away with him!
he's a villain and a traitor.
Cade. Away with him, I say!
hang him with his pen and inkhorn about his neck.
Shakespeare's point, here, and in many other places throughout his plays, is that the middle class is found guilty by the lower classes of being able to read and write thus being elitists intent to document their various crimes and misdemeanors. From wealthy merchants, to the literate clerks that serve them and the government, there are no malapropisms. Shakespeare honors each in accord with their rank.
Traditional scholars find it difficult to concede the aristocratic bias of Shakespeare's works. They are not only compelled to support the Stratfordian authorship, because of their dependence on the myth for their livings, but they take as their strongest argument that the likes of Edward de Vere only attract advocates by virtue of those advocates' fascination with the lifestyles of the rich and famous. After this fashion, the Stratford man has become a miracle — a natural genius exemplifying man's ability to overcome all obstacles including a paucity of books and education and unashamedly adopt a staunch aristocratic perspective from out of a natural nobility.
In fact, profound ironies are the rule in contemporary Shakespeare scholarship as a result of the Stratford myth. The Stratford authorship has risen to the level of a religious verity. To oppose it is heresy. Any tactic, any contortion, any accusation against the heretic is fair game in order to protect the precious story of the humble birth of the Shakespeare.
According to the official life, the child went on to attend a few years of schooling punctuated by impregnating a local woman, who he was then obligated to marry, by poaching deer at a nearby game park and by apprenticing to a local butcher. He is said to have bellowed iambic pentameter speeches as he butchered the meat.
Until his arrival in London, to expand the family business, none of it is documented but his approximate date of birth, his hurried, irregular marriage, and his children's birth dates. Upon his residence in London the records show him to have engaged in threatening severe physical harm to at least one person to whom he had loaned money, who sought the protection of the courts, engaging in illegal grain trade, evading taxes and eventually investing his profits into real-estate and highly profitable theater shares.
In short, the documented life of Shakspere of Stratford portrays a life that any mother would be proud for her son or daughter emulate. A life commensurate with a staunch aristocratic perspective and multi-lingual reading list sufficient to arrive at literary greatness.
And, as the final, and perhaps the grandest, irony, the left now meets the common man of the lower class in the persons of those who have no more than a high school education. They are the vast majority of the base that has elected their Jack Cade to the Presidency. Cade now says:
Smart people don't like me, you know?6 And they don't like what we talk about.... We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated. We’re the smartest people, we’re the most loyal people,...7
He likes them because he finds them easily manipulated to act even against their own interests so long as they can cow intellectual elitists and peoples of color. We laugh a pained laugh at the malapropisms they so confidently spout in interviews standing in the long lines outside of Trump rallies.
They don't like Shakespeare any more than the literary-political left does. Writers should have to write American.
Take from it what you can.
1 Whitman, Walt. Democratic Vistas (1871). 32.
2 Ibid. 81.
3Crosby, Ernest. “Shakespeare's Attitude Toward the Working Classes.” Tolstoy on Shakespeare (1907), Tchertkoff tr., 127.
4Tolman, Albert H. “Is Shakespeare Aristocratic?” Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 29, No. 3, 1914. 277-98.
5Ibid. 285, Citing MacCallum, Shakespeare's Roman Plays, 525.
6 Donald Trump. Bedminster, New Jersey. September 14, 2025.
7 Donald Trump. Las Vegas, Nevada . February 23, 2016.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Straford Shared a Beer in Southwark. February 9, 2026. "The Earl of Oxford would have taken this route in 1575, as would Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne,"
- Du Bartas – Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second. November 30, 2025. "After quite some time it was discovered that one John Eliot's French lesson book Ortho-epia Gallica included..."
- Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
- Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”
Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.
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