# Autoria de les obres de Shakespeare

Hi ha qui qüestiona l'autoria de les obres de William Shakespeare de Stratford-upon-Avon. Els anti-Stratfordians –un terme per referir-se als que s'adhereixen a les diverses teories alternatives de l'autoria d'aquestes obres– argumenten que Shakespeare de Stratford era una tapadora que encobria la vertadera identitat de l'autor o autors de les obres, que per qualque motiu no volia o no podia acceptar que se li acreditàs públicament. Encara que la idea ha atret molt d'interès públic, la immensa majoria dels estudiosos de Shakespeare i d'historiadors literaris la consideren una creença marginal i la reconeixen només per refutar-la o menysprear-la.
De l'autoria de Shakespeare se'n va dubtar per primera vegada a mitjans del segle xix, quan el clam que Shakespeare era el millor escriptor de tots els temps s'havia popularitzat. La biografia de Shakespeare, en particular els seus orígens humils i vida obscura, semblaven incompatibles amb la seva eminència poètica i la seva reputació de geni, cosa que aixecà sospites que Shakespeare podria no haver escrit les obres que se li atribueixen. Des de llavors la controvèrsia ha engendrat diverses obres que la tracten i s'han proposat fins a 80 candidats a l'autoria, incloent Francis Bacon; William Stanley, 6è Comte de Derby; Christopher Marlowe; i Edward de Vere, 17è Comte d'Oxford.
Els defensors dels candidats alternatius argumenten que William Shakespeare mancava de l'educació, la sensibilitat aristocràtica o la familiaritat amb la reialesa que figura a les obres. Els estudiosos de Shakespeare que han respost aquestes acusacions exposen que les interpretacions biogràfiques de la literatura no són fiables a l'hora d'atribuir l'autoria i que la convergència de proves a favor de l'autoria de Shakespeare (portades, testimonis d'altres poetes i historiadors coetanis i documents oficials) és la mateixa que s'empra per a la resta d'atribucions d'autoria de la seva època. No hi ha cap candidat alternatiu amb tal quantitat de proves directes, a part del fet que no se'n qüestionà l'autoria ni en vida seva ni durant els segles posteriors a la seva mort.
Malgrat el consens entre els estudiosos, un grup relativament petit però molt visible i que inclou figures públiques prominents ha qüestionat l'atribució convencional de l'autoria. Els anti-Stratfordians lluiten perquè es reconegui la qüestió de l'autoria com un camp legítim d'estudi i perquè s'accepti un o altre dels diversos candidats a l'autoria.

## Visió general

Els arguments que presenten els qui qüestionen l'autoria de Shakespeare comparteixen una sèrie de característiques. Intenten desqualificar-lo com a autor i sovint ofereixen arguments a favor d'un altre candidat. Normalment postulen qualque tipus de conspiració que va protegir la vertadera identitat de l'autor, que explicaria per què no es conserva documentació a favor de l'autoria del seu candidat i per què el registre històric assigna Shakespeare com a autor.
La majoria d'anti-Stratfordians diuen que les obres de Shakespeare exhibeixen tal amplitud de coneixement íntim de les corts i polítiques elisabetianes i jacobines que tan sols un noble molt educat o un membre de la mateixa cort podria haver-les escrit. A part de les referències literàries, comentaris crítics i notes d'actuació, la resta d'informació disponible sobre la vida de Shakespeare en tracta detalls mundans com ara el registre civil dels seus baptisme, casament i mort, registres d'impostos, demandes per recuperar deutes i transaccions de béns immobles. A més, no hi ha cap document que atesti que rebés una educació. No es conserva cap carta ni manuscrit literari escrit amb total certesa per Shakespeare de Stratford. Malgrat el baix percentatge de documents supervivents d'aquest període, pels escèptics aquestes llacunes suggereixen el perfil d'una persona molt diferent del poeta i dramaturg. Algunes figures públiques prominents, incloent Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Charlie Chaplin i Orson Welles, s'han vist persuadits pels arguments contraris a l'autoria de Shakespeare; els seus endossos són un argument important a moltes teories anti-Stratfordianes.
Al nucli de la discussió hi rau l'acceptabilitat de les proves emprades a favor dels autors respectius. Els anti-Stratfordians es basen en el que s'ha anomenat «retòrica d'acumulació», o en el que ells designen com a proves circumstancials: les similituds entre els personatges i els esdeveniments que apareixen en les obres i la biografia del candidat en qüestió; paral·lelismes amb les obres conegudes del candidat; i codis amagats i al·lusions criptogràfiques a les obres de Shakespeare o als textos escrits per autors coetanis. En canvi, els estudiosos de Shakespeare i historiadors literaris es basen principalment en proves directes i documentades –en forma de signatures a portades i registres governamentals– i testimonis coetanis de poetes, historiadors i aquells actors i dramaturgs que treballaren amb ell, així com en estilometria moderna. Els estudiosos afirmen que tots aquests fets convergeixen en confirmar William Shakespeare com a autor. Aquests criteris són els mateixos emprats per acreditar l'autoria a altres autors de l'època i s'accepten com a metodologia estàndard d'atribució.

## Notes
### Notes al peu

* ↑ Les edicions britànica i nord-americana de Shapiro 2010 difereixen significativament quant a paginació. Les referències del llibre citaran primer les pàgines de l'edició britànica i després les de l'americana entre parèntesis.

### Referències

* ↑ Prescott 2010, p. 273: Plantilla:"'Anti-Stratfordian' is the collective name for the belief that someone other than the man from Stratford wrote the plays commonly attributed to him."; McMichael & Glenn 1962, p. 56
* ↑ Shapiro 2010, pàg. 2–3 (3–4)
* ↑ Kathman 2003, p. 621: "...antiStratfordism has remained a fringe belief system"; Schoenbaum 1991, p. 450; Paster 1999, p. 38: "To ask me about the authorship question ... is like asking a palaeontologist to debate a creationist's account of the fossil record."; Nelson 2004, pàg. 149–51: "I do not know of a single professor of the 1,300-member Shakespeare Association of America who questions the identity of Shakespeare ... antagonism to the authorship debate from within the profession is so great that it would be as difficult for a professed Oxfordian to be hired in the first place, much less gain tenure..."; Carroll 2004, pàg. 278–9: "I have never met anyone in an academic position like mine, in the Establishment, who entertained the slightest doubt as to Shakespeare's authorship of the general body of plays attributed to him."; Pendleton 1994, p. 21: "Shakespeareans sometimes take the position that to even engage the Oxfordian hypothesis is to give it a countenance it does not warrant."; Sutherland & Watts 2000, p. 7: "There is, it should be noted, no academic Shakespearian of any standing who goes along with the Oxfordian theory."; Gibson 2005, p. 30: "...most of the great Shakespearean scholars are to be found in the Stratfordian camp..."
* ↑ Bate 1998, p. 73; Hastings 1959, p. 486; Wadsworth 1958, pàg. 8–16; McCrea 2005, p. 13; Kathman 2003, p. 622
* ↑ Taylor 1989, p. 167: By 1840, admiration for Shakespeare throughout Europe had become such that Thomas Carlyle "could say without hyperbole" that Plantilla:"'Shakspeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of literature.Plantilla:'"
* ↑ Shapiro 2010, pàg. 87–8 (77–8)
* ↑ Bate 2002, p. 106
* ↑ Shapiro 2010, p. 317 (281)
* ↑ Gross 2010, p. 39
* ↑ Shapiro 2010, pàg. 2–3 (4); McCrea 2005, p. 13
* ↑ Dobson 2001, p. 31: "These two notions—that the Shakespeare canon represented the highest achievement of human culture, while William Shakespeare was a completely uneducated rustic—combined to persuade Delia Bacon and her successors that the Folio's title page and preliminaries could only be part of a fabulously elaborate charade orchestrated by some more elevated personage, and they accordingly misread the distinctive literary traces of Shakespeare's solid Elizabethan grammar-school education visible throughout the volume as evidence that the 'real' author had attended Oxford or Cambridge."
* ↑ Bate 1998, p. 90: "Their [Oxfordians'] favorite code is the hidden personal allusion ... But this method is in essence no different from the cryptogram, since Shakespeare's range of characters and plots, both familial and political, is so vast that it would be possible to find in the plays 'self-portraits' of, once more, anybody one cares to think of."; Love 2002, pàg. 87, 200: "It has more than once been claimed that the combination of 'biographical-fit' and cryptographical arguments could be used to establish a case for almost any individual ... The very fact that their application has produced so many rival claimants demonstrates their unreliability." Shapiro 2010, pàg. 304–13 (268–77); Schoone-Jongen 2008, p. 5: "in voicing dissatisfaction over the apparent lack of continuity between the certain facts of Shakespeare's life and the spirit of his literary output, anti-Stratfordians adopt the very Modernist assumption that an author's work must reflect his or her life. Neither Shakespeare nor his fellow Elizabethan writers operated under this assumption."; Smith 2008, p. 629: "...deriving an idea of an author from his or her works is always problematic, particularly in a multi-vocal genre like drama, since it crucially underestimates the heterogeneous influences and imaginative reaches of creative writing."
* ↑ Wadsworth 1958, pàg. 163–4: "The reasons we have for believing that William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays and poems are the same as the reasons we have for believing any other historical event ... the historical evidence says that William Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems."; McCrea 2005, pàg. xii–xiii, 10; Nelson 2004, p. 162: "Apart from the First Folio, the documentary evidence for William Shakespeare is the same as we get for other writers of the period..."
* ↑ Love 2002, pàg. 198–202, 303–7: "The problem that confronts all such attempts is that they have to dispose of the many testimonies from Will the player's own time that he was regarded as the author of the plays and the absence of any clear contravening public claims of the same nature for any of the other favoured candidates."; Bate 1998, pàg. 68–73
* ↑ Bate 1998, p. 73: "No one in Shakespeare's lifetime or the first two hundred years after his death expressed the slightest doubt about his authorship."; Hastings 1959, pàg. 486–8: "...no suspicions regarding Shakespeare's authorship (except for a few mainly humorous comments) were expressed until the middle of the nineteenth century".
* ↑ Dobson 2001, p. 31; Greenblatt 2005: "The idea that William Shakespeare's authorship of his plays and poems is a matter of conjecture and the idea that the 'authorship controversy' be taught in the classroom are the exact equivalent of current arguments that 'intelligent design' be taught alongside evolution. In both cases an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on a serious assessment of hard evidence, is challenged by passionately held fantasies whose adherents demand equal time."
* ↑ Price 2001, p. 9: "Nevertheless, the skeptics who question Shakespeare’s authorship are relatively few in number, and they do not speak for the majority of academic and literary professionals."
* 1 2 Nicholl 2010, p. 3
* ↑ Nicholl 2010, p. 3; Shapiro 2010, p. 2 (4)
* ↑ Shapiro 2010, pàg. 246–9 (216–9); Niederkorn 2005
* ↑ Prescott 2010, p. 273; Baldick 2008, pàg. 17–18; Bate 1998, pàg. 68–70; Wadsworth 1958, pàg. 2, 6–7
* ↑ Matus 1994, p. 15 note
* ↑ Wells 2003, p. 388; Dobson 2001, p. 31: "Most observers, however, have been more impressed by the anti-Stratfordians' dogged immunity to documentary evidence"; Shipley 1943, p. 38: "the challenger would still need to produce evidence in favour of another author. There is no such evidence."; Love 2002, p. 198: "...those who believe that other authors were responsible for the canon as a whole ... have been forced to invoke elaborate conspiracy theories."; Wadsworth 1958, p. 6: "Paradoxically, the skeptics invariably substitute for the easily explained lack of evidence concerning William Shakespeare, the more troublesome picture of a vast conspiracy of silence about the 'real author', with a total lack of historical evidence for the existence of this 'real author' explained on the grounds of a secret pact"; Shapiro 2010, p. 255 (225): "Some suppose that only Shakespeare and the real author were in the know. At the other extreme are those who believe that it was an open secret".
* ↑ Bate 2002, pàg. 104–5; Schoenbaum 1991, pàg. 390, 392
* ↑ Callaghan 2013, p. 11: "It is a 'fact' that the survival rate for early modern documents is low and that Shakespeare lived in a world prior to the systematic, all-inclusive collection of data that provides the foundation of modern bureaucracy."
* ↑ Shipley 1943, pàg. 37–8; Bethell 1991, pàg. 48, 50; Schoone-Jongen 2008, p. 5; Smith 2008, p. 622: "Fuelled by scepticism that the plays could have been written by a working man from a provincial town with no record of university education, foreign travel, legal studies or court preferment, the controversialists proposed instead a sequence of mainly aristocratic alternative authors whose philosophically or politically occult meanings, along with their own true identity, had to be hidden in codes, cryptograms and runic obscurity."
* ↑ Nelson 2004, p. 149: "The Shakespeare authorship debate is a classic instance of a controversy that draws its very breath from a fundamental disagreement over the nature of admissible evidence."; McCrea 2005, pàg. 165, 217–8; Shapiro 2010, pàg. 8, 48, 112–3, 235, 298 (8, 44, 100, 207, 264)
* ↑ Schoone-Jongen 2008, pàg. 6, 117
* ↑ Schoenbaum 1991, pàg. 405, 411, 437; Love 2002, pàg. 203-7
* ↑ Shapiro 2010, pàg. 253–95 (223–59); Love 2002, p. 198
* ↑ Wadsworth 1958, pàg. 163–4; McCrea 2005, pàg. xii–xiii, 10; Nelson 2004, p. 149

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