Comparing Hamlet And Tom Bethell

Prominent and renowned, William Shakespeare has always been the face of the play and theatre industry due to the eminence of his great works. Within the past two centuries, however, the authenticity of William Shakespeare’s works have been questioned by many critics. While some argue passionately that the work of Shakespeare is truly genuine, others claim that his works were the product of another playwright’s. Of the many that argued against Shakespeare’s works, Tom Bethell presented evidence in The Case for Oxford that suggested that Shakespeare was indeed not the true author of his plays but rather Edward De Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. On the other hand, Irvin Matus, author of The Case for Shakespeare, strongly believed that Shakespeare
The fact that Hamlet was thought to be autobiographical heavily discredits Shakespeare as there are many parallels to Edward De Vere’s own personal life in the play. Bethell finds it skeptical that the main character of Hamlet, Hamlet, resembles De Vere in many specific personal aspects. For instance, both De Vere and Hamlet, courtiers and Renaissance men, were scholars, athletes, and poets in their respective worlds. The uncanny similarity between De Vere and Hamlet even extends to specific actions taken by both author and character. Edward De Vere was known to have stabbed a servant of Burghley’s servants because of De Vere’s superstition of spies while Hamlet stabs Polonius, in the play, but with the exact same reasoning as De Vere’s. Bethel also provides evidence in The Case of Oxford that Edward De Vere and Hamlet both attempted to travel to England but faced complications as they were captured by pirates due to their participation in sea battles. Although the significant parallels between Edward De Vere and Hamlet were not truly acknowledged until 1920, they eventually provided a stable foundation for Bethell’s persuasive argument against William
The most prominent and controversial detail of William Shakespeare’s life was that there was no evidence that Shakespeare had ever attended grammar school. In fact, no one in Shakespeare’s family was ever educated which only further weakened the argument for Shakespeare. Without at least a basic education of grammar, it is doubtful that Shakespeare could have written such elaborate and successful works. Because of the apparent evidence that Shakespeare lacks basic education, Bethell draws a conclusion that it wouldn’t make any sense that Shakespeare would have had any exposure to to the foreign languages of Greek and Latin if he didn’t even have the rudimentary basis of English to begin with. One of more notable examples of this controversy is the play Titus Andronicus since there are elements in the play that refer to greek tragedies, which English translations of the works have not published at that time. For Shakespeare to include elements of a greek tragedy, he would have had to atleast have an adequate understanding of the Greek language. Besides Shakespeare’s lack of exposure to education in general, the fact that his plays imply that he must’ve had traveled to distant lands in order to have sufficient knowledge about