Michael: I know of no school of Oxfordian interpretation. From what I've read, Oxfordians acknowledge what are legitimate interpretative methods no differently than Stratfordians. The difference, according to what I've seen Oxfordians state, is that Stratfordians have been duped. Shakspere as Shakespeare is a fraud, and Stratfordians either intentionally or not fudge the facts because they begin with assuming that fraud is the truth. Oxfordians are not offering an alternative interpretive model. They are saying that Stratfordians are so invested in the Shakespeare mythology that they can't even admit the facts -- or the lack thereof.

Michael: Because if either the Oxfordian or Stratfordian perspectives are fraudulent, and no doubt either side thinks so, I don't think somebody very interested in the debate (me!) can get to the bottom of the distance between the two sides without examining if there's not some rank dishonesty about... or at least some significant evading, dodging, avoiding, or cheating -- fudging! -- going on. People may be fudging the facts unintentionally in the sense of perpetuating the pre-fudged myths about the Author without ever having done the fudging themselves.

Plus, I like the alliteration (fudgin' da facts!) and... I like fudge.

Mark: This seems like a false comparison to me. The central impulse of these other studies pressured the acceptance of new, revolutionary thoughts. The wide, observable, obvious-once-you-look-at-it nature of these revolutions in thinking could not be held back.

The authorship question has none of these pressures. The current theories are working just fine, thank you, and the "fringe" has no real axe to swing. If everyone accepted the Oxford theory tomorrow, it would be a publicity sensation and fascinating turn of events, but it would not signify much in the way of human understanding. It would not "shift the ground beneath our feet" in any comparable way.

The inertia of the current, workable understanding more than accounts for why such a circumstantial case as the Oxford Theory can be held-off. It may easily be held off for a lot longer-- even if it ultimately turns out to be true.

Michael: Are you asking if I'm sincerely engaged in this topic?  I would have hoped my participation showed that unmistakably!

1) Theater was considered to be disposable entertainment rather than high art at the time, so few people would have thought the career of even a popular playwright like Shakespeare worth documenting (including apparently the man himself!).  Paper was expensive, and any scrap not considered indispensable was recycled in a variety of ways.  Price's notorious chart comparing Shakespeare's paper trail with that of a dozen of his contemporaries ignores the fact that those dozen represent almost the entirety of our knowledge about the vibrant world of Elizabethan theater which would have undoubtedly included dozens if not hundreds more authors.  Most of these men are so fully lost to us that we don't even know their names.  So again, the lack of evidence for Shakespeare is hardly unusual.

2) Fifty years after Shakespeare's death, Cromwell's puritan dictatorship closed all of London's theaters and forbade playing as an ungodly activity for a good decade or so.  Under these circumstances, theater went from disposable entertainment to a sinful, criminal activity.  This campaign against theater has robbed us of even more documents related to theatrical careers.

3) And fire has consumed still more.  Whether we reference the Great London Fire of 1666 or the burning to the ground of the Globe Theater itself in 1613, presumably with many of the records and manuscripts of Shakespeare's theater company, other evidence has gone up in smoke.

Michael: That so many documents specifically about Will Shakspere have survived disrepute, paper-costs, theater-closings, plagues, fires, etc., even those that directly relate to his connection to the theater, down to personal anecdotes about the man, and yet not a single one of them describe in any way his actual work as the author -- this is what it seems to me the Oxfordians are concerned with: the singular disappearance of every such document. 

Singular in the sense that if they existed every one of them has vanished and singular in the sense that such a total vanishing act is unique among his contemporaries. That they are a few of the many Elizabethan playwrights isn't necessarily cherrypicking evidence since Shakespeare was noted as a great author among those contemporaries. He was hardly by repute a piker! By no means has every conceivable document detailing the full scope of Shakspere's life survived -- but given that he was the Author, that his being so of necessity had to have been the all-consuming work of his adult life, for at least 15 years and maybe more, how could there just be... nothing?

But what if virtually nobody cared? What if Oxford being the Author was among the few of the upper crust in the know an "open secret," and the works themselves somehow got out anonymously and Shakspere latched onto them and started publishing them under his name and none of it mattered to the middle and lower classes, that his doing so would have been irrelevant to virtually everybody even if they had known what he was up to, and perhaps only a small theater crowd was aware that Shakspere was definitely not the author but were perfectly fine with his publishing these works and they never felt a need to call him out? I can definitely at least see a scenario where all this is perfectly plausible.