SHAKESPEARE .. DID HE REALLY WRITE HIS PLAYS ?
Will the REAL William Shakespeare Please Stand Up | SEASON 1 EP 9 | #shakespeare
Today is the world of influencers — people whose opinions matter. The mystery revolving around Shakespeare regarding the truth of his actually writing the many literary pieces opens up a Pandora’s Box of confusion.
Quoting from an interesting article written by Jackson Summer, it is said that many years ago, Stephen Skeena and Charles Ward attempted to rank the most significant human beings the world has ever seen and the top five they came up with makes for an interesting read. In first place was Jesus Christ. Next is Napoleon Bonaparte, then Prophet Muhammad, William Shakespeare and fifth Abraham Lincoln. Just think about that for a moment. On this list we have two individuals of unparalleled religious importance to around half the world’s population and two men who shaped the future of the continents on which they were brought up. The other guy.. well, he was pretty good with words, whatever one thinks of Skeena and Ward, since their methodology used Wikipedia as their primary source. The very fact that Shakespeare is even mentioned in this kind of company says a lot about the man’s impact on the world as the most quoted writer in history outside of the office of the Bible. His plays are performed more than any other globally, by a huge margin and he has even introduced around 1700 new words to the English language, including bandits, lacklustre, swagger, etc. It’s one hell of an impressive CV, and the extent to which the man is worshipped even to this day, is quite astonishing.
The name William Shakespeare is synonymous with greatness and everlasting literary legacy — who in this world is not familiar with the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet, the enigmatic character of Hamlet, the madness of King Lear, and dozens of other memorable figures who have entered the canons of playwriting. His works have transcended their original stories and have become the subject of college theses, academy-award winning films, seemingly endless volumes of comparative criticism, and so much more. The collective feeling of Shakespeare is one of reverence, respect, and love for his timeless stories.
Yet beneath the surface of the accolades, praise, and worldwide recognition is a great question that will always loom over his legacy — was Shakespeare actually a hoax? What is widely known is that many critics actually believe he is the greatest hoax in all of Western literature. True, the name Shakespeare and those works credited to him will always be forever linked, and there will never be a definitive way to attribute his plays to another author.
Still, it is worth examining the legitimacy of his authorship — there are many convincing reasons to believe that Shakespeare was indeed a hoax; that either a single person or many people actually wrote all of the plays normally attributed to William Shakespeare.
1. Convincing Proof of His Illiteracy Exists
Shakespeare grew up in a household in the town known as Stratford-Upon-Avon, a household where no one really knew how to write. The family would sign official papers with a mark and not with a name, which could be an indication of illiteracy. Even further, in this critical and definitive text devoted to the subject of Shakespearean authorship, author Frank Davis is shown as proving William Shakespeare was indeed illiterate, showing that every single recorded and known signature of Shakespeare was a completely jumbled up scribble that bore no resemblance to the spelling of his actual name. Can one even think that the greatest, most clever author of all time could have difficulty spelling his own name? Doesn’t seem plausible at all!
2. No Contemporaneous Authors Acknowledged His Death
In his lifetime, it is true that some other actors and writers acknowledged the author known as “Shakespeare.” However, according to Cornell Emeritus Professor Donald Hayes in his essay Social Network Theory and Shakespeare, it appears that no one wrote about Shakespeare at the time of his death, minus some privately circulated literary tributes that have since been lost. This is curious since he was a well-performed playwright back in his day. Of course, he had not yet achieved the immortal fame that comes along with the word “Shakespeare” today, but one would think that someone would have written about Shakespeare’s death. But instead, it took seven years for someone to write a published poem about Shakespeare’s death. How curious!
3. He Likely Had Little to No Education
There is no documentary proof at all of Shakespeare’s education that currently exists, or even if he had one, he dropped out around the age of 13. Although a basic grammar school existed within a mile of Shakespeare’s home, there is not even a single shred of remotely conclusive proof that Shakespeare himself ever attended the school. Also, there is not one pupil who claimed to have ever recorded the fact that they were classmates with William Shakespeare. Thi is definitely something that many will be proud of!
4. Shakespeare Could Not Have Actually Known Such Intimate Details About Italy
Many of William Shakespeare’s plays are set in Italy, but from available evidence about Shakespeare, there is no way he could have known as much as he did about Italy. Perhaps he could have travelled to Italy, but he is known for spending almost all of his time in England. Remember, traveling to another country was a much more cumbersome activity in the 17th century than it is today.
There is a book that has proved that nearly every single Italian reference in the works of Shakespeare, including things as obscure as the inland waterway systems of Northern Italy described in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen In Verona, is completely accurate to the T. How can a man who spent most of his time in England who was possibly illiterate be able to describe, in virtuosic detail, the minutiae of Italian geography and culture?
5. His Will Indicates No Interest In His Own Works or of Any Culture At All
In his will, William Shakespeare did not write a single word about his 18 unpublished plays, or about any single book, play, or poem of his for that matter. The language of the will is also purportedly uninteresting and plain, and sounds nothing at all like the language used in his stories. There also appears to be a complete absence of cultural interest in his own will, which is strange and unusual not only for a man who wrote such culturally informed literature, but also for a man living in his particular era, which was one defined by the Age of Enlightenment. Indeed, only one theatrical reference at all is made in his will, which was actually written into his will after he died, according to this famous biography of Shakespeare.
6. For many years people have suggested that Shakespeare wasn’t the true playwright he was thought to be? If he didn’t write his legendary plays, who did? Who then were the main contenders?
Somewhere in Europe in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the greatest craftsman ever to mould the English language into works of art created his masterpieces of poetry and drama. And yet never before has there been doubt as to whether or not the bard was actually behind his greatest works.
The few documents that have survived from Shakespeare’s day paint a picture of the Stratford man as an unrefined, possibly even unsavoury character of no apparent education or reputation as a writer. In fact, there is nothing in the surviving local records, other than six signatures in a barely legible scrawl that can be regarded as proof that Shakespeare was literate.
It is a common premise of all the alternative author theories that the mundane events described in the surviving records of Shakespeare’s life argue strongly against his authorship. The townspeople of Stratford are hardly likely, the theorists suppose, to have been ambivalent to the great author’s presence among them. Surely some of Stratford’s citizens would have left behind impressions of what he was really like, or copies of letters congratulating their famous neighbour on the success of his latest play. Not only are there no indications in the town records that a great dramatist lived in Stratford, there are likewise no books, manuscripts, or other relics that the writer himself might have been expected to leave behind.
7. A lack of education and the Bacon theory
The first theory to explicitly suggest that the Stratford man was not the true author was formally put forward in 1785. Based on the unexpected scarcity of existing documentation, and on references within the plays themselves that seemed to indicate that the writer was far more educated than Shakespeare could have been, Reverend James Wilmot, rector of Barton-on-the-Heath, proposed that Francis Bacon, the aristocratic Elizabethan philosopher, was the true author, incurring Queen Elizabeth’s wrath.
In addition, an Elizabethan dramatist always ran the risk of incurring the Queen’s wrath should any of his plays contain political satire that gave offence to Her Majesty. Only by preserving his anonymity could the true author be sure he would not suffer the consequences of Elizabeth’s outrage.
These concerns did influence some Elizabethan dramatists, leading to a subculture of ‘concealed poets’ among the nobility, but there is no firm evidence that the author of the Shakespearean works was among them. While speculation to this effect has been used to answer some intriguing questions about the authorship of the plays, it must remain only one of many possible explanations, the likelihood of which is uncertain.
Arguably, it is easier to imagine the rustic Shakespeare writing these outstanding plays than it is to imagine another author being so ashamed of such a feat that he wouldn’t admit to it. Further, a concern about political content seems inappropriate in connection with the Shakespearean works. Overall, the plays’ benign, pro-Tudor nature is so pervasive that one group of theorists has even argued that they must have been commissioned (or even written) by Elizabeth herself to serve as pro-government propaganda.
8. Was Shakespeare merely an accomplice?
The case for Christopher Marlowe is based on a different premise. According to Calvin Hoffman, the originator of this theory, Marlowe was already under royal disfavour when he secretly wrote the plays. In order to escape execution, Hoffman says, Marlowe fled to the Continent. His patron, Sir Thomas Walsingham, staged a fake murder so it would appear that Marlowe was dead. The plot was supposedly successful and Marlowe continued to write plays from France, with the Stratford actor serving as a front by which his work could be introduced into England. The theory is technically feasible, but there is no documentary evidence to support it and it is perhaps most enlightening simply as an example of how easy it is to concoct an explanation that fits the few available facts.
The most exotic of these internal clues are the supposed Baconian ciphers. Originally formulated by Ignatius Donnelly, this theory holds that Bacon, while unable to reveal himself during his own lifetime, put coded messages into his published works to ensure that future generations would honour him. Other Baconians have expanded on Donnelly’s ideas and by applying their theories have extracted such hidden messages as ‘Shak’st spur never writ a word of them’ and ‘These plays, the offspring of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world.’
Conclusive as these results might seem, the professional cryptologists W. F. and E. S. Friedman published an exhaustive analysis of the Baconian ciphers in 1957, which demonstrated that none are valid. Even a quick check reveals that at least some of the cryptograms simply don’t work, and that the theorists have had to fudge the results in order to get the desired message. Other methods by which Bacon supposedly encoded his messages are so flexible that practically any word or phrase the reader desires can be generated using them.
9. Lack of knowledge
But while the plays don’t seem to hide secret meanings, they do contain some explicit passages that give theorists reason to doubt that Shakespeare could have composed them. These fall into several categories, each demonstrating, according to the theories, that the writer possessed a specialized knowledge in a particular field, such as law, classical literature, courtly etiquette, seamanship, and foreign geography.
Some of the suggestive ‘technical’ passages are indeed intriguing, but there is no adequate way to measure their significance. The same lack of information about Shakespeare’s life that first raised the theorists’ doubts makes it impossible to say for sure that he did not acquire even the most unlikely expertise — by working in a law office, or travelling to the Continent with his acting troupe, or consulting reference books on any of the suspicious topics. It is also questionable just how specialized this knowledge really was because many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries made use of similar details in their own work.
Orthodox Shakespearean scholars have also demonstrated the ambiguity of the textual clues by identifying scenes that arguably could only have been written by someone of common birth, and the Shakespearean scholar H. N. Gibson has identified a number of episodes that seem to mirror Shakespeare’s life as closely as other’s match Oxford’s. The fact that such contradictory conclusions can be gleaned from the texts demonstrates that they cannot be relied upon as definitive evidence of authorship.
While many orthodox scholars concede that there is some room for doubt in the record of William Shakespeare of Stratford, support for alternate author theories has not yet gone beyond opinions based on interpretations of ambiguous clues and come to rest on the evidence of an explicit nature. Until it does, it would be rash to rewrite the history books.
