The Earl of Oxford died in 1604. Who wrote Hamlet, MacBeth, Lear, Othello, Anthony & Cleopatra, Winter's Tale, Measure for Measure, All's Well, 12th Night, and The Tempest, all of which are later?
--- "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:
> Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford
> born April 12, 1550, Castle Hedingham, Essex, Eng.
> died June 24, 1604, Newington, Middlesex
>
> English lyric poet and patron of an acting company,
> Oxford's Men, who became, in the 20th century, the
> strongest candidate proposed ... for the authorship
> of Shakespeare's plays.
>
> Succeeding to the earldom as a minor in 1562, Oxford
> lived for eight years as a royal ward under the care
> of William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) and in
> December 1571 married Burghley's daughter, Anne
> Cecil. Along the way he studied at Queens' College
> and St. John's College, Cambridge. By the early
> 1580s his financial position had become very
> straitened, perhaps chiefly through his lack of
> financial sense. His younger children were provided
> for by Burghley, with whom he remained friendly even
> after Anne's death (June 1588) and his own
> remarriage in 1591 or 1592. In 1586 Queen Elizabeth
> granted him an annuity of £1,000.
>
> He was never appointed to any important office or
> command, though he was named on the commissions of
> some noted trials of peers and was said to have been
> made a privy councilor by James I. It has therefore
> been suggested that the annuity may have been
> granted for his services in maintaining a company of
> actors (from 1580) and that the obscurity of his
> later life is to be explained by his immersion in
> literary pursuits. He was indeed a notable patron of
> writers. He employed John Lyly, the author of the
> novel Euphues, as his secretary for many years.
>
> That Oxford might be the author of Shakespeare's
> plays was first advanced in a major way in
> “Shakespeare†Identified in Edward de Vere, the
> Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (1920), a study by J.
> Thomas Looney. Looney argued that there was a
> biographical similarity between Oxford and both
> Bertram (in All's Well That Ends Well) and Hamlet
> and that Oxford's poems resembled Shakespeare's
> early work. Oxford's interest in the drama extended
> beyond noble patronage, for he himself wrote some
> plays, though there are no known examples extant.
> His 23 acknowledged poems were written in youth,
> and, because he was born in 1550, Looney proposed
> that they were the prelude to his mature work and
> that this began in 1593 with Venus and Adonis. This
> theory is supported by the coincidence that Oxford's
> poems apparently ceased just before Shakespeare's
> work began to appear...
>
> <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9057823>
>
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