Stop Giving Free Ammunition to the Enemy

Written for fellow doubters, and posted in the open on purpose: disowning our own weak arguments, loudly, in public, is itself the strategy.

A sound case can be buried so completely under bad ones that no one digs down to it. The point that mattered was there the whole time, lost under the heap of careless claims piled over it.

You already doubt; I don’t need to sell you that. Whichever name you would write in the blank (Oxford, Bacon, Marlowe, or none yet), the doubt rests on something real, and we spend much of our strength burying it ourselves.

In any contested claim you are judged by your weakest point. The other side chooses which of your arguments to answer, and it will reach for the silliest, then hold it up as though it stood for all the rest. Hand them one bad argument and you have handed them the whole exchange, because the audience arrived with no way to tell your strong points from your weak ones.

And the orthodoxy enjoys a luxury we keep forgetting: it is never actually made to defend its man. Convention has quietly excused the one candidate with no literary paper trail, arguably the thinnest documentary case of any name ever put forward, from the witness stand altogether. So the establishment’s whole strategy can be to fold its arms and wait for us to say something foolish, then point at it. Every weak argument we volunteer keeps that arrangement running: it wins them the exchange, and, better still for them, it spares them the one contest they would rather never enter, a straight side-by-side of the documentary evidence for their man against the evidence for ours. Starve them of that ammunition and, sooner or later, they have to come out and argue the documentary evidence directly.

What follows is an inventory of the ammunition we keep handing over, the arguments advocacy groups make that are weak, over-claimed, or simply wrong, and that do more damage to legitimate doubt than any defender of the orthodoxy ever could. It is written from inside the tent, and its object is to stop us losing the question on our own bad ordnance.

The principle

A bundle of claims is judged by its weakest member, and the enemy fires at that one. So the discipline is easily stated: advance only what you would stake your whole credibility on, and concede the rest loudly. Conceding a weak argument does not weaken you. Every bad claim you disown is one the other side can no longer pin on you, and an honest accounting of what doesn’t work is a sign that what you do keep has survived a real filter.

The denominator problem

One idea runs through nearly every case below, because almost every weak argument turns out to be a version of the same mistake.

When you find a detail that fits your candidate, an epithet, a coincidence, a parallel between a scene and a life, the instinct is to ask how well it fits. That is the numerator, and on its own it is worthless. A match means something only once you also ask the denominator: how many other people would the same detail have fitted just as well? A clue that points to your man, and to five hundred other Elizabethans, points, in effect, to no one.

You see the same thing in a courtroom. A prosecutor who tells the jury “the odds of this match are a million to one” has said nothing at all until someone asks how many people are in the city, because if ten of them would match, the one in the dock is no likelier than the other nine. A coincidence carries weight only in proportion to how few other people it would have fitted just as well.

When the denominator cannot be had at all, the point goes further. A method that can always produce a match but can never say how often it would match by pure chance does not deserve the name of a method at all. A question we have not yet answered differs from one that can never be answered even in principle. The second is empty of content, and that is what we have here. So “you can’t show how common this is” need not be offered apologetically. Against any argument that lives entirely on coincidence, it is the verdict, and the missing denominator is a fault in the method rather than in the critic who names it. Biographical attribution fails here for a reason deeper than present ignorance: it has no way, ever, to supply a base rate at all.

One guardrail, so the same reasoning does not cut against us. It bites only inferences of the form “feature fits candidate, therefore candidate”, a coincidence whose whole force depends on being rare. It does not touch direct testimony: a title page, a will, a payment record are not coincidences; they say what they say and need no base rate. That is why the documentary case is untouched by it.

Hold onto that word, denominator. Most of the ammunition below shares a single hidden flaw: it parades a numerator and quietly hopes no one asks for the denominator.

The free ammunition, a running catalogue

Each type gets its own section, cross-checked against the site’s Weak Arguments page so the post and the page never contradict each other, with the strongest version of the claim stated fairly before it’s set aside.

1. The plays as secret autobiography

The strongest version. The canon does seem to know things (Italian cities, the law, the inside of a court, falconry, seamanship) and it seems freighted with felt life: exile, a soured marriage, grief for a child, the resentments of a man who has been wronged. The sonnets read like confession. So the temptation follows: treat the plays and poems as coded autobiography, find the character who is really the author speaking, and match the wounds on the page to a life that bears the same scars.

Why it fails: the reasoning is circular. Look at how the argument runs. First you read a biography out of the plays; you decide which character is the author’s mouthpiece, which grief is real and which is invented. Then you turn around and offer that biography as proof the author must have lived it. But the life was never in the plays to begin with; you put it there, and now you are astonished to find it. You loaded the answer in yourself, then presented the finding of it as a discovery. It is assuming the conclusion, dressed up as proof.

Why it fails: it proves too much. Give yourself three dozen plays and a hundred and fifty-four sonnets to comb through, and you can find support for almost any life story you care to tell. The material is so vast that a determined believer will always turn up scenes that seem to fit, and they have. The same method has “proved” Oxford, Bacon, Marlowe, Derby, and the man from Stratford, each to the complete satisfaction of whoever was running it.

It is nobody’s private vice. Baconians find Bacon’s law and philosophy in the very lines an Oxfordian assigns to de Vere, and the orthodox biographer is the worst offender of all, reading Hamnet’s death into Hamlet and Prospero’s farewell as Shakespeare laying down his own pen. Everyone succeeds, because the canon is large enough to reward everyone who tries, and a method that confirms every candidate singles out none. That it keeps returning your candidate echoes the life you brought to the search, and shows nothing about who wrote the plays.

The cost to our own premise. There is a deeper cost, one that cuts at the doubter’s own starting point. The whole engine of authorship doubt is admiration for a supreme imaginative mind. Biographical reading quietly denies that mind its defining power, the power to invent, by insisting the author could only transcribe what he had personally lived. That is precisely the Stratfordian’s naive premise (“he could only write what he knew”); we have merely swapped whose biography gets the credit. Adopt your opponent’s fallacy and aim it at your own candidate, and you have conceded the principle while quarrelling over the name. A dramatist who could only write his own life would not be worth fighting over.

The honest use. Specific, unusual, checkable knowledge in the works, a precise point of Italian geography, a technical turn of law, can legitimately tell us something about what resources and experience stood behind the author. But treat it as evidence about knowledge, weighed against how freely that knowledge circulated (the denominator again), never as a diary decoded. Avoid entirely: casting a character as the author’s self-portrait, or mining the sonnets for the events of a life. (See also: The Sonnets as Autobiography.)

2. Name-puns and heraldry as proof

The strongest version. Here the smoke is real. Contemporaries did hear “Shakespeare” as shake-spear: Jonson punned on it in the First Folio, the poet “seems to shake a lance / As brandish’d at the eyes of ignorance”, Fuller did it again fifty years later (“Hasti-vibrans, or Shake-speare”), and behind them stood the whole Pallas-the-spear-shaker tradition, Minerva brandishing her weapon, ready in every educated reader’s mind. Harvey had told de Vere his “countenance shakes spears.” Add the heraldry, coats of arms with their brandished lances, and it can feel like too much spear-shaking to be nothing. Surely all of it is a wink.

And it is not only Oxford’s game. The Baconians run it move for move, casting young Francis as Pallas (“your Pallas makes me better taught”), turning up hog-and-bacon puns, unrolling their long Latin anagrams. A wink that winks just as readily at a rival candidate is not much of a wink.

Why it fails as proof: first, it points nowhere. A pun tells you a name was noticed and played with; it cannot tell you whose name it truly was. “Shake-spear” fits the actual man from Stratford named Shakespeare at least as well as anyone, better, really, since it is his own name. For the pun to point past the obvious owner toward a hidden one, it would have to carry some sense of direction, and a pun carries none. It is a signpost with nothing written on it: stand it up wherever you like, and it will seem, obligingly, to point at your candidate.

And second, the denominator. Pallas-as-praise was not a private code; it was a stock compliment of the age. Peacham’s Minerva Britanna alone drapes something like two dozen different patrons in the Pallas-Minerva convention, and Elizabeth herself was published outright as Minerva (Blenerhasset’s A Revelation of the True Minerva, 1582). A compliment paid to two dozen people cannot single out any one of them as the secret hand behind the canon, that is the denominator problem in miniature. When the base rate is that high, a match means nothing. (See also: The Denominator Problem.)

The honest use. None of this is worthless. It is reception, evidence of how the name was heard rather than of who bore it. That the period heard “Shakespeare” as spear-shaker, that emblem-writers and poets played on it, is a documented fact about how the name landed on Elizabethan ears. Presented as that, it is sound and even charming. Offered as a fingerprint, it is tea-leaf reading, and it points, of all places, straight at the orthodox answer.

Avoid entirely: any coat of arms, any surname pun, any Minerva emblem offered as evidence of who wrote the plays. Keep them as colour, and never let them carry weight they cannot bear.

3. Play-dating arguments

The strongest version. The orthodox chronology is not carved in stone. For many plays the “date” is an inference, from a topical allusion, a Stationers’ Register entry, a verse-style test, not a documented fact, and careful scholars disagree by years. Questioning a particular date is not, in itself, illegitimate.

Why it backfires. The vice lies in bending the dates wholesale to fit a candidate’s lifespan, which is a different thing from doubting a single one. That inverts the logic of inference. A play’s date is meant to be something the evidence hands you; the candidate-fitter treats it instead as a knob he can turn to whatever setting keeps his man alive. It is deciding the verdict first and then arranging the evidence to match. And because the plays are cross-linked by shared sources, companies, and allusions, you cannot move one without moving its neighbours: rescue your candidate on one play and you have bought a dozen new discrepancies elsewhere. Worse, you have volunteered to defend an enormous front. Every contested date is a place the other side can plant a flag, and a single securely late play, one firm topical anchor dated after your candidate is dead, becomes a kill shot you handed them. You have made the whole case hostage to its most contestable evidence.

And this is not an Oxfordian foible. It bites hardest wherever a candidate’s dates fail to cover the canon: Oxford, dead in 1604, and Marlowe, dead in 1593, feel it worst, and each camp is tempted to bend the timeline its own way, Oxford’s people pulling the late plays earlier, Marlowe’s insisting he lived on to write them. Nor is the orthodoxy innocent: it posits lost early versions (the ur-Hamlet) and convenient revisions to keep the whole canon inside its own man’s working life. Date-fitting tempts everyone with a lifespan to protect.

The honest position. Don’t stake everything on chronology. Question a date when you have real grounds to, the orthodox dates are inferences, not gospel, but never let the case rest on chronology, because an argument that lives or dies on re-dating plays has chosen to fight where the enemy is strongest and the line is longest. Make dating load-bearing and one securely late play can bring the whole house down, where holding it as a single strand among many keeps any lone date from that power. Avoid entirely: hanging a candidate’s survival on an early composition date, or letting the argument collapse into “was this play written before such-and-such a year.”

4. Arguments from silence and from snobbery

Two habits travel together here, and both are gifts to the other side.

Argument from silence. “No letters, no manuscripts, no books in the will, no record of a literary life, therefore he was not the author.” But absence of evidence is only evidence of absence when you would expect the evidence to have survived. For Tudor and Stuart lives of nearly every rank the documentary record is threadbare; manuscripts and personal letters survive for very few writers of the age. Finding nothing where you had little chance of finding anything tells you nothing. Silence carries weight only when you can show that comparable figures, with the same odds of leaving a trace, left the one this man is missing. A gap counts for something only when it is made comparatively, with the base rate in hand; raw silence counts for nothing, and one found document sweeps it away.

Snobbery. “A glover’s son, a grammar-school boy from a provincial town, could not have written this.” Of all the ammunition we hand over, this does us the most harm, because it is class prejudice rather than argument, and it confirms the enemy’s caricature of us: snobs who cannot believe a commoner had genius. It is also simply wrong. Talent has never respected rank; the Tudor grammar school drilled Latin, rhetoric, and the classics hard; and self-education has produced genius in every age. And it is the §1 (biographical-reading) fallacy again, the author “could only write what his station gave him”, denying the imaginative and self-teaching powers that are the whole reason the works are worth fighting over.

Avoid entirely: the raw argument from silence, and every appeal to birth, schooling, or rank. If a documentary gap is real, make it comparatively and quantitatively. Never make it a matter of blood.

5. Over-reading the monument, the will, the six signatures

The strongest version. These are real puzzles, and they should not be waved away. The Stratford monument as Dugdale recorded it, sketched in 1634, engraved in his Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), shows a figure clutching a sack, not the pen-and-paper figure standing there today. The will names no books and no manuscripts, disposes of the “second-best bed,” and reads like the estate of a man of property rather than of letters. The six surviving signatures are shaky and variously spelled. There is a real question underneath.

Why it backfires. The disease is inflation. A small, real oddity gets trumpeted as decisive proof, and the overstated version can be knocked down in ways the modest one cannot. “The signatures prove he was illiterate” is the classic: it collapses the moment anyone notes that three of the six were signed on a will as he lay dying, that spelling was unstable for everyone in the period, and that a signature is not a writing sample. Once that over-claim is demolished, the modest and defensible point underneath, that we have strikingly little literary trace of the man, is dragged down with it, discredited by association. You aimed a small oddity like a cannon, missed, and lost the oddity too.

The monument is the same trap. That Dugdale’s 1634 sketch shows a sack where a pen and paper stand today is a real discrepancy, but Dugdale’s monument engravings are documented as frequently inaccurate, and a painting made before the 1748 restoration already shows the figure much as we see it now. Those are real and sizeable doubts about the evidence itself. The honest claim is only what survives them: there is an unexplained discrepancy in the earliest record of the monument, its cause disputed. Inflate that to “the monument was secretly altered to erase the writer” and the first person to lay the earlier painting on the table sinks the whole claim, and a real loose end is written off as one more debunked doubter fantasy.

The honest use. Claim these no more strongly than the evidence allows. Stated modestly, within their limits, these small oddities can accumulate into a pattern. The moment they are fired off as individual knockouts, they are picked off one at a time, and the real puzzle goes down with them. Avoid entirely: “he was illiterate,” “the monument was certainly altered to hide the truth,” and any single relic paraded as the smoking gun. Match the claim to the uncertainty. (See also: The Documentary Problem.)

6. Ciphers, codes, and hidden signatures

The strongest version. The works are shot through with wordplay, and the age loved it: acrostics, anagrams, emblem-book riddles, names folded into Latin mottoes. Contemporaries really did pun on “Shakespeare”, Gabriel Harvey told de Vere his “countenance shakes spears,” and the emblem writers played the Pallas-the-spear-shaker game in earnest. So the invitation feels natural: if the age buried names in its verse, perhaps the true author buried his own. Read the capitals down the margin, count the letters, run the biliteral cipher, and out comes Bacon, or Oxford, or whoever you arrived looking for.

Why it is fatal. The flaw is simple: the more places you allow yourself to look, the more certain you are to find something, whether or not anything is really there. A cipher-hunt has effectively unlimited places to look. Which text? Which edition, with which spelling? Forwards or backwards? Every nth letter, for which n? First letters, last letters, the letters of a Latin tag? Each fresh choice is another licence to keep searching, and with enough licences you can pull any name you like out of any long text, the Bible, Moby-Dick, this paragraph. The method has no stopping rule and no way to come up empty. A procedure that would “confirm” the answer whatever the truth might be tells you nothing when it does. All you have proved is your own patience.

And it has already been demolished, by our kind of people. In 1957 William and Elizebeth Friedman (two of the leading cryptologists of the century; he led the U.S. team that broke Japan’s PURPLE cipher, she broke the codes of Prohibition-era smuggling rings) went through the Shakespearean ciphers one at a time in a full-length book and found not a single valid one, invalid rather than merely unproven, because the methods could be driven to yield contradictory messages at will. That finding still holds. Pretending it doesn’t is exactly the move that lets an opponent wave us off as cranks, and on that point they are right to. The honest doubter reaches the Friedmans’ conclusion first, and says so out loud.

The concession that costs nothing. So give the ciphers up, loudly. We lose no real evidence, because they never were evidence; and we gain something a contested claim cannot do without: the standing to be taken seriously on everything else. Every cryptogram we disown is a round of ammunition lifted out of the enemy’s hands.

Where the line actually runs. None of this makes the period wordplay worthless, only that it is not a cipher. That contemporaries punned on the name “Shakespeare” is a real, documentable fact about how the name was heard. Whether that punning points to a concealed author is a separate question, and a weaker one, and it was handled back in §2, not in a codebook. Keep the wordplay as colour; never sell it as a hidden signature.

What it looks like in the wild

These moves rarely travel alone. A single rallying post, written to warm up people who already agree, will stack several of them at once. The voice below is invented; the moves are the ones that recur.

“Freud was persuaded. So were a knighted actor, a celebrated novelist, and a justice of the highest court. Are we to believe minds of that calibre were simply fooled?”

Authority by endorsement. Distinguished readers have been persuaded of many things later abandoned. Who was convinced tells you nothing about what is true; the case stands on the documents, whatever the eminence of its converts. (See also Why Author Profiles Don’t Settle the Question.)

“The founding book has stood for a century and no scholar has ever refuted it directly. Silence on that scale speaks for itself.”

The critics’ silence as proof. Not being answered is not the same as being right. A claim can go unanswered because it was examined and set aside, or because few specialists think it repays the time. This kind of silence counts only when you can show a case was met on its merits and failed, which is a different thing from showing it was ignored.

“The most famous critic on the other side never even answered my letters before attacking my work in print. At some point negligence starts to look like malice.”

Motive read into a critic. Whether a critic was rude, or ignored your letters, has no bearing on whether the criticism is right. Imputing motive asks the reader to judge the person instead of the evidence, and a prepared opponent will use it to paint the doubt as a grudge. The reply is to answer what was actually argued.

What to do instead

None of this is a counsel of retreat. Disowning the weak arguments is a way of choosing the ground rather than giving it up.

Force the comparison. The orthodoxy’s whole advantage is that it is never made to defend its man. Take that advantage away. Don’t argue authorship in the abstract, set the two documentary cases physically side by side and ask the reader to weigh one against the other. The instant the question becomes “whose evidence is stronger?” instead of “can you debunk this doubter?”, we are on open ground, and open ground is where the missing paper trail tells.

Lead with what is documented, never with what is decoded. Records, contemporary testimony, the literary paper trail and its absence are evidence anyone can check, which ciphers and biographical readings are not. Build the case from the first kind and keep the second out of the load-bearing structure altogether.

Carry the denominator, or make its absence the charge. You will rarely put a number on how many others a parallel would fit, and you don’t need one. Usually it is enough to show the pool is large (common, conventional, shared) and the singling-out claim is dead. And where no base rate can be had even in principle, don’t apologise: that is the verdict. A coincidence-argument that can never say how surprising its hits are has no evidential content at all. The rule is never to advance a coincidence without confronting the denominator (with a count, a bound, or the demonstration that none can exist), and to remember that direct testimony, which is not coincidence, owes no denominator at all.

Claim every anomaly no more strongly than the evidence allows. The monument, the will, the signatures, the silences: present them modestly, within what the evidence will bear, and let them accumulate into a pattern. No single relic is a smoking gun. A dozen honestly-stated anomalies weigh more than one over-claimed “proof,” and, unlike the over-claim, they cannot be knocked over one at a time.

Concede the rest, loudly, and in public. Make the disowning part of the argument. A movement that publishes its own catalogue of bad arguments (this essay is one) tells every fair-minded reader that what remains has been through a filter. The concession works as a credibility deposit, and it pays for everything else you want to say.

Do these five things and the clutter goes. What is left is the case the doubt was always really about, no longer buried under our own bad ordnance, and left to stand on the documentary ground.