Is This Shakespeare ’ s Dramatic Juvenilia ?

Ramon Jiménez has made a valuable contribution to scholarship with his exhaustive culling of examples of plot, character, vocabulary, ideas and images shared by plays in the Shakespeare canon and earlier anonymous plays on the same subjects. Drawing on findings from a wealth of studies and archival materials to which he added his own insights, Jiménez convincingly demonstrates relationships that are best explained as works by the same author, with the earlier plays serving as apprenticeship pieces for the mature works. The corollary case that the author was Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, is treated almost as a foregone conclusion, a logical assumption given the fact that the apprenticeship plays would have been written during William of Stratford’s childhood years. Jiménez marshals multiple strands of both internal and external evidence to arrive at his dating of the apprenticeship plays, all between 1563 and 1570.