“Would the real Will Shakespeare please stand up?”Here are 10 historical figures with a genuine claim to be History’s greatest writer.
We all know that Shakespeare was a glove maker’s son from Stratford Upon Avon. But was he really? Here are 10 other people with legitimate claims to be the Bard.
Published in
9 min readOct 14, 2018
Edward De Vere — The Favourite
Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford is a possible contender for the job of ‘William Shakespeare’ and lived around the same time. The young Edward graduated from Cambridge aged 14 and would have known far more about high society than a glove maker’s son from Stratford Upon Avon.
The super-educated De Vere seems a much more likely candidate for blasting out classical illusions in his texts. There are also parallels between his life and the play Hamlet which could’ve been semi-autobiographical. His nickname at court was ‘Spear Shaker because he was very good at jousting and absolutely nothing to do with his penis whatsoever.
