In the last chapter of her book, Price masterfully sums up her case. I can't quote it all, but here are some representative excerpts. Naturally, to get the details, you have to read the book itself. I should note that, following a long-standing convention among anti-Stratfordians (those who are skeptical of the Stratford man's claims to authorship), Price refers to the man from Stratford as "William Shakspere" (as he himself appears to have spelled it) to distinguish him from the author "William Shakespeare."
The biography of William Shakspere is deficient. It cites not one personal literary record to prove that he wrote for living. Moreover, it cites not one personal record to prove that he was capable of writing the works of William Shakespeare. In the genre of Elizabethan and Jacobean literary biography, that deficiency is unique. While Shakspere left over seventy biographical records, not one of them tells us that his occupation was writing. In contrast, George Peele's meager pile of twenty-some personal biographical records includes at least nine that are literary. John Webster, one of the least documented writers of the day, left behind fewer than a dozen personal biographical records, but seven of them are literary....
One can make a case for Shakspere as a shareholder, actor, moneylender, broker, entrepreneur, real estate investor, or commodity trader, but one cannot make a case, based on the biographical evidence, for Shakspere as a writer....
Although the documented facts about Shakspere are nonliterary, they present a coherent and consistent character. Those same facts lose their coherence when combined with other facts that emerge from the literary works themselves. When biographers try to fit the two sets of facts together, they find them incompatible. Their solution has been to put the conflicting information into the same book, but into different chapters....
The constraints have forced biographers to create an abnormal noncharacter with no discernible personality. What is known of Shakspere's character is canceled out by the attempt to splice his life onto Shakespeare's literary output. The manipulation of data to obscure or rationalize the more flagrant contradictions reduces the Shakespeare of biography to an amorphous nonentity....
Shakspere, the man, is an unbelievable conflation of a self-effacing nonentity and an aggressive wheeler-dealer. Ian Wilson found it "notable" that when actor Augustine Phillipps drew up his will, he appointed "as his legal overseer trusty book keeper Heminges ... significantly not choosing for this [responsibility] an arguably dreamy writer like Shakespeare." In his next chapter, Wilson described the "hard-headed clique of businessmen, Shakespeare among them, making commercial decisions." Wilson's conception of "Shakespeare" alternated between "dreamy" and "hard-headed," and that contradictory character is indicative of a hybrid person. No consistent traits can emerge from the artificial splicing together of two distinctly different personalities....
Shakspere was supposedly a skilled writer, but his will was utterly nonliterary, and his handwriting was practically illegible. Shakespeare the poet believed his verses were powerful enough to outlive marble, yet Shakspere, a man of documented self-interest, did nothing to ensure their accurate preservation through supervised publishing....
Shakspere's documentary records are not those of a literary genius but those of a man with financial acumen and a mediocre intellect. If all the Shakespeare plays had been published anonymously, nothing in William Shakspere's documented biographical trails would remotely suggest that he wrote them....
Who, then, was William Shakspere of Stratford? The records tell us. The uncontested documentation proves that he was a successful businessman who invested shrewdly and made a lot of money. That documentation, augmented by satirical allusions, supports the career of an entrepreneur who brokered plays, costumes, frippery, loans, a marriage, and probably an impresa assignment [a minor work-for-hire job for the court].
One personality trait that is particularly well documented is tightfistedness.... During the very years that he was a tax delinquent, Shakspere was busy investing in real estate, hoarding grain, and being approached for financing.... Shakspere seems to have been quick to sue to recover debts, but slow to pay off his own obligations....
[Robert Bearman, author of Shakespeare in the Stratford Records,] found "little, if anything to remind us that we are studying the life of one who in his writings emerges as perhaps the most gifted of all time in describing the human condition. Here in Stratford he seems merely to have been a man of the world, buying property, laying in ample stocks of barley and malt and, when others were starving, selling off his surpluses and pursuing debtors in court, and conniving, as it seems, at the Welcombe enclosures" [a scheme to fence off public lands for private use]. Shakspere was lampooned early in his career as a miserly [figure], greedy for game, and his documentary records are consistent with that portrayal....
All the documentary evidence shows that Shakspere was a shrewd negotiator at the bargaining table, manipulative, sometimes involved in shady deals, and pretentious. Those characteristics are amply reinforced by the satirical allusions that biographers reluctantly introduce, only to drop like hot potatoes. Again and again, the satirical portraits deliver the same bombastic operator with an overblown opinion of himself, but none of them points to a writer.
The theatrical documentation shows that his role with the Chamberlain's/King's Men was not that of a dramatist but that of an entrepreneur and financier. The records also point to an opportunist who was associated with some of the published Shakespeare plays, and with a number of inferior texts. Shakspere's vocation as play broker could account for a number of plays, known today to be somebody else's, but published then over the name of William Shakespeare or over the initials "W. S." [The scholar E.A.J.] Honigmann observed that in the 1600s, "unscrupulous men used [Shakespeare's] name to sell plays that, as all the world now agrees, could not have come from his pen." The evidence suggests that one of those unscrupulous men was William Shakspere....
Any financial interest in play scripts that Shakspere retained as a theater shareholder was subverted by the theft of the Shakespeare plays. Shakspere therefore stood to lose hard cash from any unauthorized sale of the Shakespeare plays unless Shakspere himself stood to gain by that sale. In other words, either this aggressive businessman with a financial stake in the Shakespeare plays inexplicably did nothing to stop the piracy -- or he was the play pirate....
The contradictory and incompatible evidence has prompted anti-Stratfordians to search for an alternative author. When the hard evidence is examined, what emerges is an overwhelming weight of probability that William Shakspere of Stratford did not write the plays of William Shakespeare, and an equally overwhelming weight of probability that a gentleman of rank did. The idea that "William Shakespeare" was the pen name of an Elizabethan aristocrat is ultimately less fanciful than ascribing to an alleged grammar school dropout the most exquisite dramatic literature in the English language....
Shakespeare's chroniclers should be able to write a biography that has a rational relationship to the literary output of the man. The fact that biographers have failed after countless attempts strongly suggests that they are writing about the wrong man.... Unfortunately, until the authorship question gains legitimacy in academic and literary circles, we will all be stuck with a biography out of joint with the plays. [Pages 289-300]
Luckily, the pessimism of Price's last prediction has turned out to be unjustified. We did not have to wait for the authorship question to gain academic legitimacy in order to acquire a superb biography of the man who really wrote the works. The book is "Shakespeare" by Another Name, by Mark Anderson, and it recounts, in fascinating and meticulous detail, the countless parallels between the plays and poems of Shakespeare and the life of Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Furthermore, Anderson demonstrates that De Vere, in contrast to the Stratford man, had precisely the educational opportunities and life experiences that one would expect from the author of the Shakespearean canon.
Together, Price and Anderson deliver a devastating one-two punch to the conventional wisdom about the "sweet swan of Avon." And who knows? Someday the academic world may actually start to pay attention.
