Convergence Lines Considered and Set Aside

About This Page

The lines in the convergence framework are not the only lines that were considered. A credible framework must be able to say what it looked at and declined to include, and why. Excluding a line is a methodological act, and the reasoning behind it should be as transparent as the reasoning behind inclusion. Most of the lines below were set aside; one, legal knowledge, was reviewed against the same tests and retained, and is included so that a kept decision is as visible as a set-aside one.

Each entry below describes a line of evidence that was assessed and set aside. The reasons fall into three categories: some lines fail the agenda-free test (their primary proponents have an authorship stake); some lack differentiating power (the knowledge was too widely available to score candidates meaningfully, or too accessible via printed manuals to require hands-on experience); some overlap substantially with a line already in the framework. None were excluded because they produced an inconvenient result.

Two further exclusions, stylometrics and cipher arguments, have dedicated pages because the case for and against each is substantial enough to warrant full treatment. See Why Not Stylometrics and Cipher Arguments: A Quantitative Test.

This page also answers a familiar form of the authorship argument: the claim (catalogued by John Michell in Who Wrote Shakespeare? (1996) as some thirty-one fields of expertise, “the writer who knew everything”) that the sheer breadth of specialist knowledge in the works points to a rare, highly placed author. Much of that knowledge is real, and some of it is deep. But depth is not the test. Several of the domains catalogued below were set aside precisely because the knowledge, though genuine, was shared by every educated Elizabethan or available from a printed manual, and knowledge like that cannot tell you which person held the pen. A competence earns a place in the framework only when it is both demanding and unequally distributed. Sorting the “knew everything” list by that second test is much of what this page does; the denominator problem sets out why the unsorted list points nowhere.

Source material overlap (formerly line 18b, retired)

This line, once scored in the convergence framework, credited a candidate when the translator or editor of one of Shakespeare’s sources had dedicated that work to him. De Vere scored on it, so its retirement is felt most on the Oxfordian side. Here is why it was retired, and why the retirement is not aimed at Oxford.

Why set aside. It shared the defect of the dedications-received line beside it (18a): it measured patronage, not authorship. A translator dedicated his work to the man who might pay or protect him; that a few such works were later drawn on by Shakespeare shows the candidate was a well-placed literary patron, not that he wrote the plays. To make it evidence of authorship would require the denominator this site insists on everywhere else: of the many books dedicated to a wealthy earl, and the vast range of texts Shakespeare drew from, how many overlaps would chance alone predict? Until that number is supplied, a handful of source-dedications is a coincidence, not a fingerprint.

The line was not singled out because it favoured a particular candidate. It was retired at the prompting of a correspondent who argued, correctly, that the dedication-based lines tilted toward de Vere. The test of whether that judgement is honest is whether the same razor cuts when the faulty line helps the candidate the site is accused of favouring. Retiring a line that favoured Oxford is that test; the same review corrected other lines that had understated Marlowe, and the net effect was not to crown anyone; the wealthy-patron advantage simply came off the table.

Nor is the observation erased. That translators of certain Shakespeare sources dedicated work to Oxford remains a documented fact, discussed on his assessment page, where it can be weighed with its denominator in view. What it can no longer do is sit on the scoreboard as clean evidence of authorship, because, for Oxford as for anyone, it is not. If the clustering can be shown to exceed chance, the line has earned its place and can return.

Medical knowledge

The works contain references to medical conditions, treatments, and anatomical observation precise enough that medical writers have catalogued them. That the knowledge is real and often exact is not in dispute; the argument that it is exceptional, consistent with formal medical training rather than the general familiarity of an educated layman, has been pressed mainly within the authorship debate.

Why set aside. Chiefly differentiating power. The medical and anatomical knowledge in Lear, Othello and All’s Well, precise enough that medical historians have documented it, does not correspond to any candidate’s documented expertise in a way that separates them, with at most one partial exception in Mary Sidney Herbert, whose household medical knowledge and long association with her physician are set out on the author-profile page. Knowledge that fits no candidate in particular tells us about the author’s mind without helping to identify the person, the same defect that sets aside biblical knowledge. The stronger reading, that the knowledge requires formal medical training and so might discriminate, is the one whose proponents most often have an authorship stake, and it has not been independently established.

A secondary problem is overlap. The medical argument relies substantially on plant-based treatments and herbal remedies, the same territory covered by botanical knowledge, which is already line 14 in the framework. Adding a medical knowledge line would risk double-counting evidence already captured.

If the medical content could be shown both to exceed what any educated Elizabethan would possess and to attach to a specific candidate’s documented expertise, distinct from botanical knowledge, the line would be reconsidered.

Seamanship

The case here is scholarly. Alec Falconer's 1964 monograph Shakespeare and the Sea (Falconer was a former Royal Navy commander and professor at St Andrews) documents technically accurate nautical commands in The Tempest ("bring her to try with th' main course," "lay her ahold") that go well beyond decorative colour. Oxford Academic's Forum for Modern Language Studies published further analysis in 2010. Both sources are independent of the authorship debate. A notable supporting fact: Sir Henry Mainwaring's first English nautical dictionary was not published until 1644, which means the knowledge could not easily have come from books.

Why set aside. The scholarly basis passes the agenda-free test. What fails is differentiating power. Elizabethan England was a maritime nation. London had the Thames, the dockyards, Drake's voyages were common knowledge, and the Globe Theatre sat near the waterfront in Southwark. Maritime vocabulary was ambient in ways that falconry (which required a mews, a salaried falconer, and the right social rank) was not. It would be very difficult to score any London-based candidate as having no plausible access to nautical knowledge. A line that cannot produce meaningful differentiation across candidates adds noise rather than signal.

There is also a credibility problem in the secondary literature: Falconer apparently published a subsequent glossary that was widely regarded as undermining his own case by including terms too general to establish specialist expertise. The net scholarly position is less firm than the 1964 monograph initially suggests.

Heraldry

The scholarly basis here is the strongest of the three excluded lines. C. Wilfrid Scott-Giles, a practising herald who served as Fitzalan Pursuivant Extraordinary, published Shakespeare's Heraldry in 1950, an exhaustive analysis of heraldic accuracy and usage in the works. Guy Cadogan Rothery produced a separate annotated commentary in 1930. Both authors were domain specialists with no authorship agenda. The works use heraldic terms including technical blazon vocabulary (Cassio's "quirks of blazoning pens" in Othello is a term of art, not decoration) in ways Scott-Giles describes as "spontaneous, natural, unforced."

Why set aside. Heraldic knowledge, unlike falconry, was not restricted by social rank in the Elizabethan period. It had spread from the nobility through the gentry to the educated professional and merchant classes over the preceding two centuries. Contemporary accounts describe it as standard equipment for any civilised man. This makes it very difficult to use as a differentiator: a positive score would attach to almost any candidate with an education, and a negative score would be hard to defend for candidates with documented connections to the gentry or above.

A specific complication arises with Shakspere: he applied for a grant of arms from the College of Heralds in 1596, giving him documented direct exposure to heraldic process. Whether that exposure explains the depth of heraldic reference in the plays is a separate question, but it means he cannot be scored ~ without engaging an argument about the sufficiency of that exposure, and that argument would itself be contested.

Scott-Giles's work remains the most authoritative specialist treatment and would anchor the line if the differentiating-power problem could be addressed. The line is set aside, not permanently retired.

Horsemanship

Horses appear in all of Shakespeare's plays, and the equestrian references are often technically precise. The most striking example is the disease list in The Taming of the Shrew (glanders, lampass, windgalls, spavins, yellows, fives, staggers, bots), a catalogue so specialist that some terms defeat modern editors entirely. Early Modern Literary Studies (peer-reviewed) has published serious equestrian-literary analysis, and equestrian scholars working independently of the authorship debate have documented the depth of the works' horse knowledge. The social access argument has some force: expert horsemanship at anything above basic riding required a stable, a groom, and sustained involvement.

Why set aside. Unlike falconry, where no printed guide existed before the period and hands-on access was structurally restricted, horsemanship was extensively documented in widely circulated printed manuals. Thomas Blundeville's A New Booke Containing the Arte of Ryding (c. 1560) and Gervase Markham's Discourse of Horsemanshippe (1593) and subsequent works covered precisely the vocabulary of horse care, disease, and training that the works display. These were popular texts aimed at gentry and substantial farmers, not specialist literature. A playwright who read Markham could write Petruchio's horse. The knowledge-from-books route cannot be excluded, which means the line cannot reliably differentiate candidates on the basis of hands-on experience.

Biblical knowledge

The scholarly foundation is strong. Naseeb Shaheen's Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays (University of Delaware Press, 1999), the work of a literary scholar who owned one of the world's largest collections of early English Bibles and had no authorship agenda, documents over 1,000 biblical allusions across the canon. The analysis distinguishes between versions (the Geneva Bible held priority; the Bishops' Bible is also present), between allusions borrowed from plot sources and those added from the author's own memory, and between levels of engagement from passing echo to structural design. The depth is not in question.

Why set aside. Differentiating power is effectively zero. Church attendance was compulsory in Elizabethan England. The Geneva Bible sat in every educated Protestant household. Biblical language saturated the surrounding literary culture (in Holinshed, in Plutarch's translators, in the drama of the period generally). No candidate on this site can plausibly be scored ~ on biblical knowledge, and a line on which every candidate scores positively reveals nothing about who the author was. Shaheen's work tells us a great deal about the author's mind. It tells us almost nothing about which specific person that was.

Legal knowledge (reviewed and retained, line 7)

Unlike the entries above, this line was tested against the same challenge and kept. It is recorded here because the decision was close, and the reasoning belongs in the open beside the exclusions.

No knowledge domain in the works has been argued over longer. Across roughly two centuries and some thirty-five books, lawyers and scholars have held that the plays show technically accurate legal knowledge: Edmond Malone first noticed it (1778); Lord Campbell, a Lord Chief Justice, set it out in Shakespeare’s Legal Acquirements Considered (1859), “to Shakespeare’s law … there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of exceptions, nor writ of error”; William Lowes Rushton, Richard Grant White and Sir George Greenwood (The Shakespeare Problem Restated, 1908; Shakespeare’s Law, 1920) extended it; and the modern treatments (George Keeton’s Shakespeare’s Legal and Political Background (1967), Daniel Kornstein’s Kill All the Lawyers? (1994) and B. J. and Mary Sokol’s 400-page Shakespeare’s Legal Language: A Dictionary (2000)) keep the case alive.

The set-aside challenge. The strongest skeptical work is also the most methodologically serious, and it is this site’s own instrument turned on the question. Paul Clarkson and Clyde Warren, in The Law of Property in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Drama (Johns Hopkins, 1942), compared the legalisms of seventeen dramatists and found Shakespeare “average at best” (about half his fellows used more legal language, many with no less accuracy), concluding that his usage “must be explained on some grounds other than that he was a lawyer.” Earlier skeptics (William Devecmon, 1899; J. M. Robertson, The Baconian Heresy, 1913; Arthur Underhill, 1916) and later ones (O. Hood Phillips, Shakespeare and the Lawyers, 1972) rest largely on that comparative point. It is precisely the denominator objection: if the knowledge is merely typical of working dramatists, it cannot tell you who the author was, the same defect that set aside seamanship and heraldry.

Why it was retained anyway. Two things distinguish it. First, the Clarkson and Warren finding is about quantity (how many legalisms, how often) and the depth case never rested there. Even Sir Dunbar Plunket Barton, whom skeptics cite, conceded that Shakespeare surpassed his contemporaries “in quality and aptness rather than quantity or technicality.” The paradigm is the gravedigger scene in Hamlet, which parodies the reasoning of Hales v. Petit (Common Pleas, 1562), the suicide-forfeiture case reported, in Law French, in Plowden’s Commentaries. Counsel there divided the act of self-slaughter into three parts; the clown burlesques it exactly: an act “hath three branches; it is to act, to do, to perform.” That is not legal vocabulary in the ambient sense but knowledge of one obscure case and its argument, and the allusion is accepted across the scholarship, orthodox and otherwise (see Tom Regnier, “The Law in Hamlet,” Brief Chronicles III, 2011). A single instance of that kind does more for the depth claim than any tally of legalisms can do against it.

Second, and this is what the entries above lack, documented legal training is unequally distributed across the candidates. Seamanship and biblical knowledge were set aside because every candidate could plausibly claim them; legal training cannot be claimed for everyone. Shakspere has no documented legal education (~); de Vere was admitted to Gray’s Inn, Bacon was a barrister and Lord Chancellor, Neville served on parliamentary legal committees, and North was of Lincoln’s Inn. A line on which the candidates genuinely differ retains differentiating power, and so it stays, scored on documented training, not on the assumption that the works prove a lawyer wrote them.

That last caution matters, because the current academic mainstream reads the plays’ legal saturation as a feature of the culture rather than a personal fingerprint: an intensely litigious society, with the Inns of Court at the centre of London’s literary life (Subha Mukherji, Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama, 2006; Bradin Cormack, A Power to Do Justice, 2007; Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion, 2007). The line honours that caution by scoring what the record shows, which candidate had legal training, and leaving the works to raise the bar, not to name the man.