A host of brilliant minds, including Sigmund Freud, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and Orson Welles, agree that William Shakespeare did not write the plays that many so admire. Of the documents related to Shakespeare, none are literary. They reveal a man who is mainly a businessman, one delinquent in paying his taxes, one cited for hoarding grain during a famine. And he is the only writer of his time for whom there is no contemporary evidence of letter writing and during Elizabethan England, anyone who was literate wrote letters. There is no record of Shakespeare owning any books and, according to John Orloff, who wrote the screenplay for “Anonymous,’ there were two colleges during Shakespeare’s time and his name is not listed as having attended. Shakespeare was a country boy so how did he learn the languages, receive the vast education (e.g., astronomy, geography, literature), gain his exposure to the lifestyle of the rich upper class and learn the intricacies of court intrigue to write such masterpieces as Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth and Hamlet?
Mark Twain is said to have favored Sir Francis Bacon. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is an Oxfordian, that is, he believes the works ascribed to William Shakespeare were actually written by the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. ‘Where are the books? You can’t be a scholar of that depth and not have any books in your home,’ Justice Stevens says. ‘He never had any correspondence with this contemporaries, he never was shown to be present at any major event – the coronation of James or any of that stuff. I think the evidence that he was not the author is beyond a reasonable doubt.’
The epitaph on Shakespeare’s gravestone reads:
Good friend, for Jesus’ sake, forebear
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man who spares these stones,
And cursed be he, who moves my bones.
Those who doubt that Shakespeare is a great writer point to this rough doggerel and wonder how can it be from a man who wrote:
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow…. (Macbeth)
Nonetheless, supporters of Shakespeare argue that his authorship was not questioned during his lifetime or for centuries after his death and no supporting evidence exists for any other candidate.
What do you think?
2 comments:
Since I first became aware of Shakespeare in high school, no one could have convinced me that someone else wrote his plays and sonnets. To tell you the truth, I never even really thought about it. I had heard somewhere that Sir Francis Bacon might have written some of them but I thought it was unlikely. After seeing the film (fictional) I am now fairly certain tha "Old Will" did not write them. Who did, I can't say, but an illiterate grain merchant with not a book to his name nor a day of travel outside his home country nor one lesson in college, could not have written anything like these. We will probably never know the whole story, unfortunately.
Well, there's a rather large group of academics who would argue that Shakespeare did write those wonderful plays, sonnets and poems. However, I tend to agree with you. It seems unlikely that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him. Whoever did did a masterful job, never to be matched.
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