By Another Name

Over at the First Things site, David Hart launches out at the Oxfordians, ending with this suggestion: “No Oxfordian has yet convincingly responded to the ‘stylometry’ problem, for instance. If they were really on their game, however, they would argue that this merely exposes another conspiracy hitherto unsuspected, and that the works commonly attributed to Oxford are clearly products of another hand. I propose Francis Bacon. As for the inevitable discovery of similar incompatibilities between Bacon’s style and ‘Oxford’s,’ one need only argue that, of course, ‘Bacon’s’ works were really written by someone else altogether. As for who this might have been, the answer seems obvious: William Shakespeare of Avon, who it turns out was a far more cunning and mysterious figure than any of us ever suspected . . . ”