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Virtual Classroom | Fellowship Home |Chronology
The Chronology Question......
One rational objection against the de Vere theory is that he died in 1604, before several Shakespearean plays were allegedly written. Conventionally Lear (1605), Macbeth (1605), Timon (1605), Pericles (1607), Antony and Cleopatra (1607), Coriolanus (1608), Cymbeline (1609), Winter's Tale (1610), The Tempest (1611) and Henry VIII (1613) are dated after his death.
When orthodox scholars are being honest, however, they admit that these dates are the insecure result of inferences which may be far less than conclusive. Often, in fact, orthodox chronological reasoning is circular. The great EK Chambers, to whom most subsequent scholarship on the chronology is greatly indebted, concedes the significant element of doubt in his chapter on chronology:
"I have attempted to bring together the results of chapter ix and fit them into the facts of Shakespeare's dramatic career as given in chapter iii. There is much of conjecture, even as regards the order [of composition], and still more as regards the ascriptions to particular years. These are partly arranged to provide a fairly even flow of production when the plague and other inhibitions did not prevent it" (Chambers 1930 I: 269).
Chambers' quote reveals the precarious position of a Shakespearean orthodoxy which depends on the chronology argument as a "magic bullet" to slay the monster of the Oxford theory. How sure is anyone that The Tempest, for example, was really written in 1611 and not, as Gwynneth Bowen suggests inthis 1951 essay, in 1603-04? As so often happens when one examines an issue in its complexity, the dogma of orthodoxy begins to look suspect.
Moreover, as Paul Crowley shows in this companion essay, the methodology by which the official chronology has been constructed mimics the logic of a six-year old.
The resulting conclusions, Crowley insists, amount to an ultimately indefensible "just so story": orthodoxy incorrectly dates the plays as much as 15-20 years later than their actual date of original composition. But even if the actual discrepancy is only five years, and not twenty as Crowley's critique suggests, the results are fatal to the objection that Oxford died before the plays were completed.
Peter Moore published this critique of the orthodox view of chronology in the Shakespeare Newsletter in 1990. You might think that by 2005, orthodox Shakespeareans would have have taken notice that the "argument from chronology" for excluding Oxford's proposed authorship has the intellectual value of a 1940's bowling trophy. Concluded Moore in 1990: "The 'late start, late finish' theory on Shakespeare's dates is a rotten edifice founded on circular reasoning, spurious precision, shaky assumptions, selective use of evidence, and willful ignorance of context."
In this companion piece, Moore looks closely at the alleged evidence for the indubitable link between The Tempest and William Strachey's letter (f.p. 1625) recounting a 1609 shipwreck in Bermnuda.
And in this recent addition to the virtual classroom, a companion piece to the Moore articles first posted May 23, 2005, Lynne Kositsky and Roger Stritmatter examine in detail and critique David Kathman's undated internet essay, Dating The Tempest.
No wonder some prominent apologists for the orthodox view soft-peddle the chronology argument by only claiming that Oxford died "before the date of first performance of the plays." They know perfectly well how impossible it is to defend a more dogmatic view.