Don't let this distract you from the fact that I get bullied because my classmates think my videos are the worst. Please don't agree, dear 60

This needs more likes

what's the affiliation between wendover and HAI? are they run by the same entity or just hosted by the same person. im subscribed to both but have no idea their connection

How airlines made it possible for Shakespeare to write his plays.

@@loganblevenson I think it’s the latter; he might run them both, too.

Did Shakespeare write books?

40th like

thanks for watching

i mean reading fUCK

@@youcreateyourreality idk if that works tho

Ohhh. Not that shakespear, the other shakespear. Makes sense

That's actually what Shakespeare deniers are now claiming. Shakespeare was a pen name (they all have various theories about the name's origin) for some toff, and an actor with a similar name came along later and claimed authorship, or perhaps was posthumously confused for the author.

I agree. A lot of great people had no training in their fields of achievement. There are great scientists who never went to school and mathematicians who never read a book. English is not a big deal when compared to quantum mechanics.

Not to detract from your overall point, but there is actually some debate over whether Newton should get priority for the invention of calculus. He clearly came up with the ideas himself, but he did so at roughly the same time as the German Gottfried Leibniz. It’s unclear who got there first, and Leibniz’s notation is far more popular today.

@@elijahdschultz Sure, I am familiar with this information. Evidence seems to suggest both came up with Calculus independently, but using different formulations and notations. Both men were clearly great mathematicians of their time. I just know more about Newton and his origins.

@@elijahdschultz Depends. Leibniz's notation is more popular among mathematicians, while physicists stick to Newton's notation (the dot above the function symbol). That's also part of the deal in this whole hussle. If I'm not mistaken, Newton came up with all this a bit earlier than Leibniz. But nobody was fully aware of that, since 1. he haven't published the bulk of it, yet, and 2. nobody got what the heck Newton's been doing there. His notation completely eludes everyone who has no notion of differentiation. That's why Leibniz's work is still honored today (even though Newton did his best to file for plagiarism and what not), because finally people had a chance to unterstand what was going on.

That’s what it looks like only at the first sight. I used to think the same. But as you study Shakespeare’s works deeper and learn more about his times, you’ll probably start having doubts lol Just for the record, a literature major here, have never believed in any conspiracies. As for now I don’t have an opinion on Shakespeare’s identity. And if he was who we think he was, then he was even a greater genius. I like this channel, but I have to say this particular video isn’t very well researched

.

you're

@@ezko woyure

@@ezko yOu"Re

@@ezko Thanks I just usually don't pay attention to my spelling.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day I trust you'll understand the reference to another Scottish tragedy Without my having to name the play

@@1.4142 quiet

@@Scourgeoftengri uptown

This isn't tragedy, this is farce.

Just like that one Simpsons writer. I forgot his name but you can find the video about it.

He just wasted his time with fking books, I have no respect at all for literature and many many others dont have it eiter

@@pr1sma370 gr8 b8 m8 !

@@pr1sma370 Yeah I hate porn mags too, man.

@@pr1sma370 either* Maybe you should pick up a book. It would really help!

But he has nothing on Lil Mozzy

@@fica1137 bruh nobody spits better bars than the speare guy

@@fica1137 best watch out before 21 savage rolls up on you with a broadside

Is this where the West sub recent prims take to mimicking Whyte names, like charlemagne, or lol poop...?

@@AMR_k400 disagree, I think 40th symphony was a banger track

Who really wrote those plays isn’t important. It’s the plays themselves that are important.

@@notmenotme614 Yes, that's what I was saying. When all you know about the author is their work, the author's identity becomes irrelevant.

Now I’m curious if he said that on QI before or after he portrayed Shakespeare in Upstart Crow.

@@kaitlyn__L Before. It was in the Series I episode, "The Immortal Bard".

From the perspective of a theatregoer or a reader, this may be true. However, the idea that one can be justified in dismissing every piece of extant documentary evidence (all of which show that William Shakespeare was the author) and constructing an alternative 'reality' that posits that everything we think we know is the result of a conspiracy has definite implications for historiography.

Cause apparently being a stratfordian means to be one to believe.

Stratford 'Avent's

to add even more pretentiousness

Blame him for covid then lol.

Lol agreed.

OOOOOOOWEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOO

Welcome to the Boostrap paradox

He owns them both, but the Wendover guy is different

yeah I can totally get behind this one

Lol

Get it if you dumb

Are we going to call it Infinite Monkeygate, or QWERTYAnon?

Francis Bacon was in movie about William Shakespeare with Elizabeth Taylor. She was in a movie about Anthony and Cleopatra with Richard Burton. Burton played Ferdinand in The Tempest, as well as Henry V in...

Nice spellings! (like from me!)

Oh how i love humanity

We just call him "Sam".

So wait, is HAI wendover or not? I thought he was but the moon landing definitely happened

You do realize the antisemitism in that *comment*, right? *I'm sorry I meant to say conspiracy theory not comment. I apologize for the confusion.

Believing in lizard people allows you to flee from your responsibility. The lizards serve as a foreign enemy. People also believe(d) in several gods.

@@owendriscoll3440 what the fuck. What do lizard people have to do with jews?

@@wunder1385 Please do a quick google before cussing me out. Even asking google, "What do lizard people have to do with jews?" Would have answered your question.

@@owendriscoll3440 even if that's true how is my comment antisemetic?

Their*. Funny thing is to be a competent writer you need to be an excellent reader. They go hand in hand. The amount of words he used, and introduced is suspicious enough. A man from an illiterate family with illiterate children, no book collection, with no recorded education who could barely scrawl his name probably couldn't revolutionize the english language.

​@@ronhempfield5043 Shakespeare's family was not illiterate, nor were his children provably illiterate. In fact, for Susanna Hall (née Shakespeare), we have it on record that she was capable of describing the contents of one of her husband's books to a prospective buyer even though it was in Latin, she was eulogized as being "witty above her sex", she was probably the author of the memorial to Anne Shakespeare, and we have a signature of hers that is extant. Clearly she was capable of both reading and writing. In other words, literate. Likewise, we have an extant signature from Gilbert Shakespeare, one of Shakespeare's brothers. Two more of Shakespeare's brothers, Richard and Edmund, followed their elder brother into the theatre and therefore had to at least be capable of reading, because actors got their lines in cue scripts. We don't have as good evidence of Judith's literacy, admittedly, but that is neither here nor there because you can't infer _illiteracy_ from a lack of evidence of literacy: absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. She signed with a mark, but so did many provably literate people. There was no stigma against it. And even if she was less literate than her sister, there are many possibilities why, including dyslexia. Furthermore, since Shakespeare wasn't home in Stratford to personally oversee his children's education, even if they were _both_ provably illiterate it wouldn't matter at all. As for William Shakespeare's father, John, he was chief magistrate in Stratford, bailiff, and alderman, and he couldn't have fulfilled any of these civic functions if he'd been unable to read. There is no evidence that Shakespeare did _not_ possess a book collection. The dimwits who harp on the fact that his will didn't mention any ignore the fact that _most_ wills didn't mention books. Of the fifteen wills of Bankside playwrights studied by E. A. J. Honigmann and Susan Brock in _Playhouse Wills: 1558 - 1642_ , only _three_ playwrights (William Bird, Samuel Rowley, and Arthur Wilson) mentioned books in their wills and the other twelve, including Shakespeare, did not. A will is different from an inventory. You only specify things in wills that are going to specific legatees. If something goes unspecified, then it goes to the residuary legatees, who in this case were Dr. John Hall and Susanna Hall, who also got New Place. Thus there was no need to mention any books because they simply stayed on the shelves while his son-in-law and daughter moved in. As for "no recorded education", you're being dishonest in telling a technical truth in order to convey a substantive lie. You want people to believe that the lack of a record of William Shakespeare's education is unique to him. In fact, we have _no_ class rolls for _any_ students from the King's New School in Stratford until the 18th century. _Anyone_ who attended the local grammar school in Stratford and then didn't matriculate elsewhere for the first 150 years of its existence "has no recorded education". But we have records elsewhere that show that Stratford was paying a succession of schoolmasters, and I doubt they were being paid to stand in an empty building. And once again, we get the complaint that his signature wasn't pretty enough to mark him as a literary genius. In which case, Salman Rushdie isn't a literary genius either, because you wouldn't believe the scrawl he left on my copy of _Shalimar the Clown_ . However, his signatures _are_ a paleographic match to the writing of the "Hand D" section of the _Sir Thomas More_ manuscript, and that manuscript is a stylometric match and a match based on internal evidence to Shakespeare's other writing. For example, you mention Shakespeare introducing new words, and one of those is the verbing of "shark", as in the opening scene of _Hamlet_ where Horatio says: Now, sir, young Fortinbras, Of unimproved mettle, hot and full, Hath in the skirts of Norway, here and there, _Shark’d_ up a list of lawless resolutes, For food and diet, to some enterprise That hath a stomach in’t; which is no other, As it doth well appear unto our state, But to recover of us by strong hand And terms compulsatory, those foresaid lands So by his father lost. And in _Sir Thomas More_ we get: For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, With self same hand, self reasons, and self right, Would _shark_ on you, and men like ravenous fishes Would feed on one another. [Emphasis added.] That last line was deemed by Shakespeare too good to let go to waste when _Sir Thomas More_ wasn't produced, so he put it into the first scene of _Coriolanus_ : What's the matter, That in these several places of the city You cry against the noble Senate, who (Under the gods) keep you in awe, which else Would feed on one another? So here we have the usage of a unique verbing of "shark" in one acknowledged Shakespeare play and in the "Hand D" portion, self-plagiarism of a line from the "Hand D" section, and the paleographic identification of the "Hand D" passage, with running emendations that had to be authorial, with the known signatures of William Shakespeare. And bear in mind, since you harp on pretty signatures so much, that the more a signature departs from type, the more useful it is for paleographic analysis. For example, one unique characteristic of Shakespeare is that he often didn't close the top loop of an "a", which made it look more like a "u", and one of the most frequent errors in the printings of Shakespeare's plays is the introduction of a u for an a or an a for a u, because compositors couldn't tell the difference between these two vowels when Shakespeare wrote them. Finally, it has to be asked, what evidence do you have to prove that Shakespeare _didn't_ write any of the plays and poems attributed to him? All you've done is provide a list of specious and false reasons why he doesn't live up to your idea of an authorship candidate, but that doesn't overturn the substantial body of evidence that shows that Shakespeare wrote the works. You need to address why it's his name on the quartos and four folio editions; why other writers praised him by name as a writer (e.g. John Webster in his letter to the reader in _The White Devil_ , whose next play, _The Duchess of Malfi_ , was given to the Shakespeare's company to perform); why Frances Meres could, in 1598, name thirteen plays by Shakespeare, twelve of which correlate with known plays (excepting _Loues Labors Wonne_ ) even though these plays were either not published or published anonymously; why the plays were performed by the same company in which Shakespeare was an actor; what he was doing that was so important that he was made a sharer in the company if he wasn't the house playwright; and why the references to Shakespeare change to "M." or "Mr." or "gent." or "gentleman" after William Shakespeare of Stratford was granted a coat of arms, making the Stratford William the only William Shakespeare in the country who was entitled to these honorifics.

@@Nullifidian well you may be correct. I don't claim to be an expert or even the most studied person on this page on this particular issue. I'll readily admit to this. In fact I haven't even looked into this in many years. I did in fact go through your extensive comment and you appear to have made some valid points. we are all just speculating, and although it is interesting I really don't care enough about it to spend much time investigating. So I'll remain neutral, it's a frivolous endeavor in my opinion. As in I don't plan on expending any time or effort, or any other resource to come to the conclusion shakespeare did exist, simply not the pursuit of wisdom. This is not the kind of questions I focus on. Interesting but not really relevant.

@@ronhempfield5043 Meanwhile, Oxford is the leading proponent of a group that wanted to expand the language with appropriate foreign words. Oxford was fluent in French and Latin. WS went to the 8th grade at best... I smell a 17th century cover-up for political and social reasons that escape the modern mind.

@@edwardboswell5675 I'm sure you can document his membership in that group, or even its very existence.

I had an English teacher mention (but not insist) that not all of Shakespeare's poems were written by him as there happens to be several that of his love poems seem to be from a woman to a man (or simply to a man), though I don't know how well that holds up if you take into account the possibility of commissioned work, homosexuality, gender identity or just having a laugh and doing some literary flexing. Hell the dude was a writer, I wouldn't put it past him to do some catfishing to pay some bills

What if fake news are neither news nor fake? But as the soviet saying goes: there‘s no truth in the news and no news in the truth. Now that didn’t help.

Yeah not just drake

Was looking for that comment. Thanks

Also he is one of only two people to hold two knighthoods at the same time.

Waiter! This water is soaking wet!

Not actually, although it may sound stupid, there is a decent amount of evidence that he was an uneducated, illiterate person

Yes and it so cleverly laid that no matter where you stand the floor is under your feet.

​@@vibby1004 If you're talking about William Shakespeare, then there is absolutely _no_ evidence that he was uneducated or illiterate. For one thing, there's all the extensive evidence that he was a writer. And even if you dismiss that evidence for no good reason whatsoever, there's also extensive documentary evidence that he was an actor. Actors _had_ to be literate to read their cue scripts.

I am tired of this conspiracy theory

No it’s not it’s run by the reptile people

Why can't people just be objective and solve everything with facts and logic?

@@zenoblues7787 Because the Illuminati is mind controlling us into believing these crazy conspiracy theories

I almost got a fine arts degree. Luckily I switched to the natural sciences department and got a degree in cultural Geography, so I can now be a somewhat more covert non-contributor to society. 😁

Uh spooky

The classic bootstrap paradox

ah yes the first realistic theory

Use common sense, and don't whine that the big bad "MaInsTReaM MEdiA" debunked your laughable bullshit.

@@GarlicPudding #we'retherealresistance

Last time I was this early, people accepted that the earth is not flat.

@@edwinhuang9244 too true

Very ironic, considering that anti-Stratfordian theory is that the real author(s) were elites who had to publish under pseudonyms for obvious political reasons and that it was well-known in the theatrical community at that time that Shaksper was a cover for him/them. Apparently his plays' reputation was minor enough at the time of his death that no one made a big deal of the false attribution until 150 years later, by which time the fact of Shaksper being a front man had been lost from the collective consciousness.

​@@no_rubbernecking Evidently all the dangerous political content that these "elites" were supposedly publishing under the plays of Shakespeare also dropped out of the works. Except, speaking as someone who has read the entirety of the First Folio, which was originally published in 1623, it dropped out rather more quickly than 150 years. My reply, which doesn't seem to be sticking any other way, so I'm trying this as a desperate last attempt: So you say it's "obvious" and that gives your claim the force of Holy Writ? What a novel idea. I should try that. "It's true because I say so". So much less tedious and time-consuming than worrying about only saying what I can support with facts. Because if it's "obvious", then it must have been even _more_ "obvious" at the time, and that leads me to ask where you think the Master of the Revels had gone off to. The Master of the Revels was the official state censor of the public theatres. Every play had to have his approval or else the playwrights and the company that staged the play was at risk of arrest or worse. Conversely, the Master of the Revel's approval could protect you if you got caught up in a backlash. So seditious material was being funneled through the name of Shakespeare-because of course that's the most efficient way to get a message out in the early modern period, by having it staged in an era when the London companies only traveled due to plague and when plays enjoyed an initial run of about a week before they were switched for other works in the repertoire-and you're telling me that despite the fact that it was "obvious", the Master of the Revels never saw any of it. You'd hardly need a false name if everything were above board and in line with the establishment's dogma. Moreover, not only did the Master of the Revels not see this, but the Lord Chamberlain of England, Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon and Queen Elizabeth's first cousin (Henry Carey's mother was Mary Boleyn) didn't see it either and continued as theatrical patron of a company producing loads of obviously seditious material through the man who was ostensibly their house playwright. This frequently included court performances at which nobody breathed their suspicions of what was being staged. Then, after Queen Elizabeth I died, King James I and VI decided that he really loved sedition and gave the company a royal warrant to transform them into the King's Men. Needless to say, after becoming the King's Men and given James' love for the theatre, the court performances increased dramatically. And still _no one_ at court saw this "obvious" seditious material for what it was. Well, if it's so "obvious", then perhaps you'll be able to point out some examples where Shakespeare contradicted the establishment narrative and became seditious. It can hardly have been just once nor could it have been very ambiguous. You don't line up a front man for 20 years just to feed him one bit of equivocal dialogue in one play. The plays ought to be riddled with sedition, so finding examples will be easy.

As I said, the reasons are obvious in the material. So evidently... it didn't drop out? 🤦‍♂ @@Nullifidian

My English teacher taught me this lol

That's not actually true- Scalia may have been a bigoted nut who didn't like Vatican II but not even the traditionalist Catholics ascribe to the idea of original authorship for the gospels (in fact arguments about which of them was written first date at least as far back as Saint Augustine) or Biblical literalism (that's an exclusively Protestant thing)

@@q345ify scalia is a self described originalist. He was a devout catholic. I wouldn't call him a bigot, he followed a specific jurisprudence philosophy.

@@KomodoDojo Having gone thru the evidence, Scalia determined that the case for Edward DeVere was MUCH stronger than that of the Stratford money-lender. Who do you think is more suited to sort through evidence, Scalia and SCOTUS's Justice Stevens, or the hacks at the Stratford Birthplace Trust, (aka The Stratford Tourist Trap)...... I appreciate that Scalia weighed in on the subject. Kudos to him.

@@edwardboswell5675 I think your reasoning is 100% fallacious.

Sam rll be dissin my boy Freud

@@faresboudelaa6352 he deserves to be dissed

Or, for Americans of a certain age, Claudius in the BBC TV production of I, Claudius.

​@@MahlenMorris And for those of us who also like to read Shakespeare's contemporaries, he was the lascivious Duke of Venice in Alex Cox's film _Revengers Tragedy_ (based on the play by Thomas Middleton). But my first experience of seeing Jacobi was in the made-for-television film of _Cyrano de Bergerac_ by Edmond Rostand, translated by Anthony Burgess, and based on the 1984 RSC production (which gets a brief mention in Antony Sher's _The Year of the King_ ). _Cyrano de Bergerac_ has been one of my favorite plays for ages.

Also knighted for his services to the theatre, and one of the UK's most decorated Shakespearean actors.

Nah it's half as interesting

Wait ... that’s illegal

That doesn't make him smart.

Being a master at interpreting Shakespeare to the degree that all Shakespearean experts admire you, the world over does, in fact, mean you are “smart.” It does not mean he is right. But he does not claim to be “right.” He claims the right to doubt.

Oh absolutely. People who have doubts about the authorship of Shakespeare are mad toxic zealots who will cause irreparable psychological damage to those unfortunate enough to be left in their caustic screeching company for more than 2 minutes. Once immersed in such frothing insanity they’re beyond the point of help and should be excised from one’s life immediately, not unlike taking a sharp blade to some kind of revolting pustule.

Yeah, this did not happen.

@@floatingholmesNot sure if you're just here to stir shit, or you're trying to be reserved in what you believe online (fair), but the conspiracy theory "conversation" (mostly just one person ranting) used to happen to me plenty. Less so now because I've learned the early signs and I shut such conversations down. Maybe one of the joke theories, but even those can get weird.

And so ignorant that he admits it!

He has a whole series as the War Master in Big Finish audioplays. I haven’t listened to them but I hear they’re good.

He starred with Sir Ian McKellen in the short-lived but absolutely hilarious series 'Vicious'. Look it up on KZfaq, you'll spew liquids out your nose. He also played the monk Cadfael in the in the series of the same name. Wonderful stuff.

He is also one of England's most revered Shakespearean actors and has been knighted for his services to the theatre,

John d was the real author

@@thirtythree504 Yeah,it was Michael Jackson trust me. Michael Jackson wrote those plays. I have eVidEnce

What?

?

"One is that there is no trace of any of the drafts of any of the plays, like there are of other contemporary plays from other playwrights." You've been lied to in two ways. First, there is a draft manuscript in Shakespeare's hand that contains inline emendations by the author, and it's the Hand D section of _Sir Thomas More_ . Shakespeare was part of a team of revisers of the play that also included Thomas Heywood and Thomas Dekker (as well as possibly Henry Chettle), working on a play originally authored by Anthony Munday (and possibly co-authored by Chettle-the nature of his contribution is still up for debate). Second, full manuscripts don't survive for _most_ early modern plays from the public theatres, and _none_ that went on to be printed. Of the public theatre plays that went on to be printed, we don't have a single extant manuscript until the Restoration period. What we do have are scattered manuscripts, like _Sir Thomas More_ and _The Second Maiden's Tragedy_ , that were never published and probably never performed, or we have mere fragments like the one page of _The Massacre at Paris_ by Christopher Marlowe, which isn't even in his own handwriting (it may be a fragment from a prompt book copied out by the theatre's scribe). "The fact that he did not one a library at that time...." There is no evidence that he _didn't_ have a library; there is merely no evidence that he did. Taking an absence of evidence as evidence of absence is a logical fallacy. It's particularly fallacious since the basis for the argument is that he didn't mention books in his will. But unless his books were going to a specific legatee _other_ than his two residuary legatees, Dr. John and Susanna Hall, then there is no reason why they would have been mentioned at all. And even if it could be proven that he had no library at Stratford in 1616, it doesn't matter because he didn't work in Stratford; he worked in London. So the argument is irrelevant even if every premise is granted. What could be more natural than, having made the decision to retire, he didn't feel like lugging a library full of books 100 miles back to Stratford-upon-Avon? "and no records of him visiting any public or private library" Are there surviving records of _anyone else_ visiting a private library in this era? (Public lending libraries didn't yet exist.) And again, even if this were true, it would be irrelevant, because Shakespeare didn't need a library when he had London. The area outside St. Paul's was clogged with stationers shops, as we know from the title pages of publications of this era, which included instructions on where to find the stationers' shops. He could have simply browsed and read there.

And an inability to understand that the Early Modern period was different from ours. They keep on seeking autobiographical 'parallels' in the works to their favored authors, partly because they have no real evidence but also in large part because they sincerely believe that all writing _must_ be autobiographical. So naturally they gravitate to some knight or earl or even a monarch as the 'true' author, because an autobiographical reading of practically _all_ Early Modern literature would lead you to that conclusion. It's just lucky most of them don't know any other writers than Shakespeare.

@@Nullifidian TAKE NOTE: DeVere's daughter was married to one of the dedicatees of the First Folio. Another was tentatively married to the 3rd Earl of Southampton, who WS dedicated his two epic poems to. (think of a commoner telling a royal to get married in a sonnet! Off with his head) Oxford died in disgrace, and his in-laws were Keepers of the Records. They obscured their problem relative, which is why it took until 1920 to discover the true author. Oxford's life is the life of Hamlet. Oxford went to Italy, went to law school, had acting troops, and had the best education in the realm, at a time of no public libraries and not even an English dictionary. If you think the works illuminate the musings of someone who grew up in an illiterate home with (at best) an 8th grade education, Bless your heart.

I assume you're speaking of the strident Stratfordians who think they're right about everything simply because the have a job at the Stratford Tourist Trap

@@edwardboswell5675 I've had to split this response into two parts. Part 1: "TAKE NOTE: DeVere's daughter was married to one of the dedicatees of the First Folio." So what? It shows how much your mind is made up already that your first 'evidence' is a game of Six Degrees of Edward de Vere. Unless one has the preconceived idea that Edward de Vere was the author, the coincidence doesn't strike one as meaningful. A more pertinent fact for the purposes of attribution is that John Heminges and Henry Condell affirm in the dedicatory epistle that the author is their "Friend, & Fellow" whom they name as "SHAKESPEARE". Furthermore, the Pembroke brothers had absolutely no role in the creation of the First Folio. Their only role was as the objects of the dedication. We know who funded the creation of the First Folio because the colophon on the last page tells us: it was the consortium of William Jaggard, Edward Blount, John Smethwick, and William Aspley. It was "printed at [their] charges" as a bit of venture capitalism: they hoped to make their money back from the sales, and sales were evidently so good that a second edition was published just nine years later. Furthermore, while the Oxfordians like to imagine that the First Folio was Susan's gift to her beloved father, in fact he ran out on all his daughters by dumping them on William Cecil and there's no evidence he ever saw them again. Furthermore, it's a bit late as a memorial, considering it was published fully 19 years after de Vere died in 1604. Of course, that's largely because Shakespeare kept on writing until about 1613 or 1614, which might be the point at which to abandon the hypothesis. "Another was tentatively married to the 3rd Earl of Southampton, who WS dedicated his two epic poems to." "Tentatively married" as in never came close to being married. "Tentatively married" as in Henry Wriothesley preferred to pay a huge sum of money to William Cecil rather than stand next to Elizabeth de Vere while they said their "I dos". Note also to whom Wriothesley had to pay that money. De Vere wasn't involved in the marriage negotiations and he didn't want them to happen because his daughter's dowry was going to be carved out of what little remained of his estate that he hadn't wasted. The lawsuit on this is a matter of public record. So the Oxfordian idea that he wanted Wriothesley to marry his daughter and therefore penned the procreation sonnets is utterly vitiated both by his indifference to all his daughters and his positive abhorrence of the fact that the dowry for his daughters would be carved out of his (comparatively, for a nobleman who never learned to live within his means) slender resources. "(think of a commoner telling a royal to get married in a sonnet! Off with his head)" This could be the type specimen for Oxfordian argument. First, they assume some comically inaccurate view of the rigidity of the class structure in early modern England - evidently your model for early modern England is the Queen of Hearts in _Alice in Wonderland_ . Second, they assume that their _interpretations_ of a text are _facts_ that need to be addressed. There is no evidence that Shakespeare was addressing _any_ specific person when he wrote _any_ of his sonnets, let alone the procreation sonnets, nor is there any evidence that, if they were addressed to someone, that Henry Wriotheseley was the object of them. That is merely one interpretation. Third, there is no reason to jump from the dedication of _Venus and Adonis_ and _The Rape of Lucrece_ to the sonnets because the sonnets weren't dedicated to Henry Wriothesley by William Shakespeare; they were dedicated to a "Mr. W. H." by "T. T.", the publisher Thomas Thorpe. There is absolutely no evidence that Shakespeare was involved in the dedication in any way, nor that Henry Wriothesley was the dedicatee. Indeed, addressing a nobleman as a mere "Mr." would have been an insult, an observation that also demolishes the supposition that it's William Hebert. The most plausible explanation is that "W. H." is William Holme, a fellow publisher and at least a personal acquaintance of Thomas Thorpe, who had recently died (which explains why the dedication references "eternity" and is in the shape of funerary urn). When Shakespeare dedicated _Venus and Adonis_ , he dedicated it to "The Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Baron of Tichfield". The idea that he'd turn around and address him merely as "Mr. W. H." after that is an absurdity that is so stark that it is its own rebuttal. Fourth, like most Oxfordians, you also ignore Shakespeare's contemporary writers. In this case, you're ignoring the fact that another "commoner", John Clapham, published a narrative poem warning about the dangers of self-love and rejecting women titled _Narcissus_ and dedicated it to the Earl of Southampton. He managed to make it to 1619, 28 years after the publication of his poem, with his head upon his shoulders. And here we can be pretty certain that the allegorical push to marry was intended because Clapham was William Cecil's personal secretary and Elizabeth de Vere was Cecil's granddaughter. Fifth and last, you've simply made a crude error by calling Henry Wriothesley a "royal". He was a member of the nobility, but he was not a "royal". Even if you believe in that truly repulsive Prince Tudor hypothesis X 2 where Wriotheseley is de Vere's son by incest on the mother who bore de Vere, Queen Elizabeth, that scenario wasn't accepted and Wriothesley was not in the royal line of succession. Nor would de Vere, as an illegitimate offspring, have been in the line of succession either. And since the Oxfordians took over the Prince Tudor hypothesis lock, stock, and barrel from the Baconians, the same thing would have been true in Francis Bacon's case if it had ever happened, which of course it didn't. So in the course of a parenthetical remark of only 17 words-17! I wonder if I can attribute your post to de Vere-you've managed to make an error or an unjustified assumption on an average of once every 3.4 words. "They obscured their problem relative, which is why it took until 1920 to discover the true author." You're typing this as if you think J. Thomas Looney found actual evidence for de Vere. He didn't. He claimed he was creating a "profile" of the true author, but what he was really doing was rejecting Shakespeare's authorship out of hand and casting about for an author who better suited his preconceptions. It might make Looney a good object lesson in motivated reasoning, but as a piece of attribution it stunk. It's little wonder, with his tin ear, that he would then go on to edit a book of poetry presenting works known to be by other authors, like "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" by Sir Walter Raleigh, as if they were de Vere's own works. "Oxford's life is the life of Hamlet." Really? Then it was a good thing that Saxo Grammaticus psychically intuited the life of Edward de Vere four centuries before so that he could write the story of Amleth in the _Gesta Danorum_ around the facts of de Vere's life. However, I thought de Vere was English, not Danish. Also, he was on good terms with his stepfather, whose marriage to his mother did _not_ deprive him of the title of earl, he didn't send two school friends of his to be executed, he didn't murder his monarch, nobody ever thought he was insane, Anne Cecil managed also to remain sane and not drown herself, so what remains except that he once had an encounter with pirates? But even that collapses under close examination of the text and comparison with the actual event. De Vere wasn't "captured" by pirates, but merely robbed by them. Hamlet wasn't robbed, but rather they treated him "as thieves of mercy". And most damning of all, the pirate part only exists in the second quarto and Folio editions of the play. It's a plot hole that got plugged by Shakespeare in between the pirated-pun unintended-edition represented by the first quarto (1603) and the second (1604/1605). (I just reread the first quarto edition of _Hamlet_ a couple of weeks ago in _The Arden Shakespeare: The Complete Works_ , and I read the entirety of the First Folio last year, so I know this firsthand.) Shakespeare simply needed a convenient way to get Hamlet from off a ship in the middle of the open sea and back on land in Denmark, a point he'd previously overlooked. But is it possible for someone to overlook their own autobiography? Next you'll be telling me that he must have written _King Lear_ because he had three daughters. However, the basic error that you Oxfordians make here is one of anachronism: people simply didn't write detailed autobiographical confessions under the guise of art in this era. This only started with the Romantics and William Wordsworth's publication of the autobiographical poem _The Prelude_ . Sometimes you're even more anachronistic in thinking that de Vere was making explicit the secrets of his heart in a way that wouldn't be done until the Confessional Poets of the mid-20th century. That others have made similar anachronistic assumptions about the works is no excuse: two wrongs don't make a right.

Part 2: "Oxford went to Italy," And said in a 1576 letter that he never cared to see the country again. Not that he'd seen that much of it, _pace_ Richard Roe, since the actual ascertainable evidence doesn't place him any further south than Tuscany. In any case, setting plays in Italy was common practice. Ben Jonson did it, Thomas Middleton did it, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher did it, John Marston did it, John Webster never set any of his solo-authored plays anywhere else, etc., etc., etc. One thing Oxfordians don't do is look at Shakespeare's contemporary authors to sift the commonplace from the uncommon. It wouldn't even be evidence that de Vere wrote Shakespeare even if he were the _only_ person to have visited Italy, but of course he wasn't. Nor can Shakespeare be proven _not_ to have visited Italy. Even if, as a young actor, he couldn't go on his own dime, actors frequently traveled in retinues or toured the Continent. "went to law school," He did _not_ go to law school. He lost every lawsuit he defended, he committed Dogberry-esque solecisms in his written Latin (e.g., "summum totale" for _summa totalis_ and "fyre facias" for _fieri facias_ ), out of the four Cecil wards admitted to Gray's Inn he alone _never_ paid for law books, and only William Carr out of the four of them paid any chamber rent. At the time, the Inns of Court extended courtesy nominations to the members of the nobility and the nobility would use the Inns as forerunners to gentlemen's clubs like White's. If he ever showed up in person to Gray's Inn, it was only to dine. If he had actually studied law, he would have sought a pupillage in a chambers and would therefore have had to pay chambers rent. William Carr was thus the only lawyer-in-training among them. "had acting troops," This is actually _damning_ to the case for Edward de Vere as Shakespeare. Because the Lord Chamberlain's Men _wasn't_ his acting company. His was the Lord Oxford's Men (also there was a company of boy players, Lord Oxford's Boys). So why on earth would he have starved the company he patronized of the fruits of his pen and given them to a company he had no reason to even visit? It would have made the task of keeping up a front that much harder-in fact, almost impossible. It would have been far easier for him to have, if he didn't want to claim credit for them for whatever reason (the Oxfordian "stigma of print" is complete nonsense), to have peddled them through John Lyly or Anthony Munday, both of whom were playwrights and his personal secretaries, and then had them performed by the Lord Oxford's Men or Lord Oxford's Boys. "and had the best education in the realm," He didn't even have the best education in the Cecil household! We have the schedule of his tutoring in Cecil's own hand, so we know exactly what he studied. He studied Latin for two hours a day, one hour in the morning and one in the evening, he studied French for two hours a day, one in the morning and one in the evening, he was taught cosmography (mapmaking) for an hour, and the rest of the time not spent in meals or prayers was devoted to half-hours of penmanship, dancing, and writing and drawing (not even a half hour of writing alone!). By contrast, Cecil drew up a far more ambitious program for his son Robert, that added to Latin and French lessons education in Greek, Italian, and Spanish, and added to cosmography education in mathematics and music. Meanwhile, we also know what the content of a grammar school curriculum was in the 16th century, where students would spend sunup to sundown six days a week translating from Latin to English and from their English back into Latin, and being set tasks to write in specific kinds of voices, writing dialogues, etc. in imitation of the great classical models. If you wanted to create a crop of genius playwrights, the 16th century grammar school curriculum could hardly be improved upon. "If you think the works illuminate the musings of someone who grew up in an illiterate home with (at best) an 8th grade education, Bless your heart." No, I don't, because I know Shakespeare's parents were _not_ illiterate and I know what a grammar school education actually consisted of in the 16th century, rather than simply assuming what it consisted of based on the meaning "grammar school" has today. If you think speculation and anachronistic, ignorant assumptions about the early modern era trump direct documentary evidence, then bless _your_ heart.

@@jonathonfloyd8153 not alternative writer, but writers. So shakespeare likely wrote some of the plays or parts of some of the plays, but wasn't the sole writer. He had a company helping him produce the final works. Like Marvel - you know it's by Stan Lee but 90% of the works are by people you barely know even with modern information and technology.

​@@TasX Co-authorship is a different issue from denying Shakespeare any role in writing his own plays, which is what the "Shakespeare authorship question" is about. Even if every play currently suggested as being co-authored were proven to be so, that would still only amount to 12 plays out of 41 ( _1 Henry VI_ , _Titus Andronicus_ , _Edward III_ , _Sir Thomas More_ , _Measure for Measure_ , _Macbeth_ , _All's Well That Ends Well_ , _Timon of Athens_ , _Pericles, Prince of Tyre_ , _Henry VIII_ , _The Two Noble Kinsmen_ , and _Cardenio_ ), leaving roughly 3/4 of the plays as Shakespeare's solo efforts. And at least two of those plays, _Macbeth_ and _Measure for Measure_ , aren't thought to be collaborations as such, but solo Shakespeare works that were later revised by Thomas Middleton. It's also worth pointing out that most of Shakespeare's proposed collaborations involve _single_ co-authors, not the group of co-authors that your use of the word "company" implies. Brian Vickers covers this subject in _Shakespeare, Co-author_ . _Sir Thomas More_ is suspected to be the result of one of these consortiums, but it's one for which Shakespeare appears to have done the least amount of work, contributing only three manuscript pages of additions ("Hand D") to the existing play that was written by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, then revised by Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood, and possibly one or more other playwrights whose words were copied down by a professional scribe ("Hand C"). Shakespeare appears to have co-authored plays early in his career, when he was the journeyman playwright being paired with experienced hands like Thomas Kyd and George Peele, and late in his career when he was the experienced playwright paired with up-and-comers like Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher (who went on to take over Shakespeare's role as house playwright of the King's Men after he retired). For the majority of his career, however, he wrote alone.

@@Nullifidian Oh cool. Thanks for clearing that up.

couldn't agree more

or science

@@xyabc1463 explain

@@heisen-bones religion helps people to find knowledge, peace and orientation in a world, no one can fully understand. its methods are philosophical, spiritual, traditional and based on human sensation. science helps people to find knowledge, peace and orientation in a world, no one can fully understand. its methods are philosophical, statistical, analytical and based on proving/disproving theories. so the only difference is the method of aquiring information.. both fullfill the human desire to understand whats going on.. human kind appeared on this planet without anyone explaining them how to live.. every invention.. every idea.. every tradition.. we found out everything by ourselves.. think about a baby that hat to grow up without parental help.. this is very difficult and probably traumatising. so by my opinion.. it doesnt matter wheater you believe in religion or practise science (to find orientation). if you want to build a bridge.. science is the better tool.. if you want to fight depression.. the spiritual way is the better tool ;) just think about what you need and take the way that better suits for that need.

That's the literal obvious definition of the purpose of religion, mate.

Nice Try. The records show that the first mention of WS's father was being fined for having a muck heap in his front yard. Later, he stopped going to church to avoid people he owed money to. If the man signed his name, along with his wife, with X marks, what makes it "likely" that he could read, at a time when the literacy rate was around 15%? Look at the six signatures of his son, Will blotted his name more than once, and no two signatures looked alike...

Agreed. Because of John Shakespeare's position, school was actually free for his sons. There was a push at the time to get middle class boys educated. The Shakespeare's were clearly politically and socially ambitious, so they would obviously have taken that opportunity. I personally assume the father could at least read based on the positions he held. I think it also likely the mother could read as well. She was a younger daughter who was exucutrix of her father's will and there is an elaborate initial (hers) on the executed will that leads some to believe she could both read and write (skills taught separately then- far more people could read than write).

He signed his name with a mark.

@@edwardboswell5675yes, he may have not been able to write, tho it was not uncommon for people who could to just mark sometimes. Like a scribbled initial today. Not being able to write does not mean he could not read. They were very separate skills. Far more people knew how to read than knew how to write. And anyway, that has nothing to do with whether his son could, which we absolutely, incontrovertibly know.

Maybe father ran a brothel😮

And Mark Twain wrote Mark Twain. If you searched the records for Twain instead of Samuel Clemens, you'd come up just a little short of the literary records of Will from Stratford. WS Profile: Someone keenly familiar with the law, someone who went to Italy, someone with access to rare books, someone who spoke foreign languages, namely Latin and French fluently, someone with a direct connection to both the 3rd Earl of Southampton (engaged to one of Oxford's 3 daughters), and a direct connection to the First Folio (Both Dedicatees of the First Folio were Oxford's in laws. with the 1st Earl of Montgomery being married to Susan Vere)..... There are scores of circumstantial evidence that connects DeVere/Oxford with the WS Canon. Too many to list here. READ UP on the 17th Earl of Oxford, it's enlightening, fascinating, and worthwhile. It is, after all, the greatest literary mystery of all time.

Of the 10 major writers/dramatists from the period, only "Shake-speare" has zero letters, zero mentions of him during his lifetime (as the author from Stratford), NOTHING, as though he's invisible. Most writing at the time was anonymous, yet Shake-speare was quite famous, thanks to Venus and Adonis mostly.

@@edwardboswell5675 "Of the 10 major writers/dramatists from the period, only "Shake-speare" has zero letters" Wrong. Unless Christopher Marlowe is not a "major dramatist". Or Thomas Kyd. Or John Webster. Or Thomas Heywood, the most prolific English dramatist of the era. In fact, there aren't surviving letters for _most_ early modern dramatists. The two we have from Ben Jonson are solely due to the fact that they were written to the government begging to be let out of prison, and governments keep everything. If it didn't wind up in a nobleman's family archive or some sort of official institutional archive, then it didn't last. "zero mentions of him during his lifetime (as the author from Stratford)" Wrong. There are numerous mentions of him during his lifetime, and every time he was referred to by his social status, it was a clear identification of the William Shakespeare of Stratford because only he alone was the William Shakespeare-and after his father's death in 1601, the only Shakespeare-entitled to style himself as a gentleman by virtue of his coat of arms. For example, 1613 edition of John Stow's _Annals_ lists Shakespeare as "M. Willi. Shakespeare, gentleman" in a list explicitly ordered by social rank ("according to their priorities"). However, even if this weren't true, and he were only identified with Stratford after his death, so what? People don't forget everything about you as soon as you die. Provided that the people who make these references are contemporaries who know you (and both Ben Jonson and Leonard Digges provably knew Shakespeare-Shakespeare acted in at least two of Jonson's plays and named Digges' stepfather, Thomas Russell, as one of the two overseers of his will), it doesn't matter when they said what they did. "Most writing at the time was anonymous, yet Shake-speare was quite famous, thanks to Venus and Adonis mostly." This is the one thing you've gotten correct. Since most writing was published anonymously, there was nothing to stop any 'secret author' from doing the same. So why choose a false name and then line up a front man if they simply wanted to evade having the work attributed to them? By the way, you seem to place great stock in the hyphen. May I take it, then, that anything that was printed _without_ a hyphen in the name on the title page is established as being by William Shakespeare? Like, for example, the entirety of the First Folio?

Freud, 2 Supreme Court justices, Sir Derek Jacobi, Michael York, Paul Nitze, Chaplin, etc. etc. Do you consider these believers in Edward DeVere being the true author to be ignorant? You must be very smart, or very uninformed on this fascinating literary mystery. Mark Twain as well, although he died before Oxford/DeVere was identified in 1920....

@@edwardboswell5675 I is very smart! :-)

@@edwardboswell5675 You are confusing "ignorant" and "stupid". They are not the same thing, though one can be both. Twain was ignorant of the evidence, most of which was not readily available in his day. Actors, even great ones, might be total idiots. That two Supreme Court justices could be ignorant of the evidence, or ignore it altogether, is scary, indeed.

Yeah, especially the argument “he was poor, so he must have been illiterate”, that just ignores the fact that, at that time, people with a medium sized wealth usually learned how to read and write. “But hey, he didn’t write a lot of letters, so it couldn’t be him!” I hate conspiracy theorists...

There's nothing odd about it. Shakespeare's manuscripts weren't his own property. Once he wrote his plays, they became the property of the company that performed them. Doubtless Shakespeare, as a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain's Men/King's Men, would have had some say in the publication of his plays in quarto, but they still were no longer his alone. And once a play was published, the manuscripts ceased to be of any value. The printer would have likely recycled them. If only half a page was written on, he could cut off the unused portion and use it for a flyleaf, and the parts covered over with ink could still be used in stiffening the binding or making straps and boards. Not that they'd be any more likely to survive if they were his own, because paper was expensive and it wasn't wasted. Through ordinary, homely domestic uses, Besty Baker, the cook to the 18th century antiquary John Warburton, went like an inferno through fifty-one of the plays he owned, and all but five (which were preserved in other copies) were lost forever. He just left them around and she thought that here was an excellent source of spare paper. The cult of the author didn't exist back then, and every scrap of Shakespeare's manuscripts weren't going to be prized possessions, least of all his plays which had very little status as literature. It wasn't until Ben Jonson published his _Workes_ in folio in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, that plays were given treatment as serious literature, and naturally it took a supreme egotist like Jonson to stake that claim. Effectively, plays became known as literature _because_ Shakespeare's plays were so good, but Shakespeare himself couldn't have possibly intuited that his future works would have that reputation. If he could, he'd doubtless have been more careful of preserving his legacy.

@@Nullifidian but not even any letters to close friends?

@@randomperson6988 Who says there weren't any? Just because none survive now doesn't mean that we can safely infer he never wrote any. It's 400 years ago. Letters get lost, particularly in an era when paper was expensive and wasn't wasted. The household uses of paper, from firelighters to making bags to lining pans, means that very few letters from the era of any sort survive. Most of the ones that do are to or from the royal court. Barring weird quirks of fate, the majority of letters we have preserved are in government archives because governments keep everything. So we have Ben Jonson's letters begging to be let out of jail (following _The Isle of Dogs_ and the _Eastward Ho_ affairs) and his manuscript for _The Masque of Queens_ because it was given as a gift to Prince Henry. Otherwise, letters from playwrights are generally rare. There was no cult of the author and no reason to assume that Shakespeare would enjoy the posthumous reputation he has done. He was very popular-we can infer this by the number of quartos with his name on them, both the legitimate ones and especially the false attributions (e.g. _Locrine_ and _The London Prodigal_ ) that were made to make the plays more saleable-but he was seen in his own day as at the head of a field of at least twenty other good to great playwrights and hundreds of others. So there was no reason to treat every last scrap of his writings as a treasured possession and keep them forever.

Isnt that like the point?

You must be new here

You probably enjoyed playing Lady Macbeth and Tamora as well.

@@Jeffhowardmeade it was not an acting class.

@@ambervasquez-keyes8523 Too bad. You could have said you were a method actor playing a conspiracy theorist.

@@Jeffhowardmeade lol very true. I don’t subscribe to the theory I just enjoyed goofing with him.

@@ambervasquez-keyes8523 That would have been a fun class to audit.

The Dunning Kruger effect isn't real. I have a degree from a clown college, so I'm an expert and you can trust me.

@@bane2201 Good to know but there are some people out there that think that they good at stuff but clearly aren’t but it’s doesn’t effect most people so I guess it doesn’t really count

Humans never went to the moon. Just some other species that looks like humans, acts like humans, and is called humans. They sent us the recording of it. :)

Shakespeare authorship doubters also believe that aliens built ancient landmarks? Those zealots get crazier and crazier.

Even longer: 240 years after his death. Delia Bacon and William Henry Smith were the originators of Shakespeare authorship denial. Delia Bacon published articles in _Putnam's Magazine_ in 1856, following it up with her book _The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded_ the next year. William Henry Smith published a pamphlet in the form of an open letter to Lord Ellesmere titled _Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare's Plays_ also in 1856. Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616.

Yeah all those big names listed were the big dumb.

Also generally they are people who are overall gullible or dont trust people with more power than them. Hence so many "what the government are REALLY up to" ones and people believing stuff because they were told it and haven't seen anything that DIRECTLY refutes it. "I was told the earth is flat. The horizon looks flat. Nothing else I have seen refutes that, therefore it must be flat." And no offense to the theists but frequently they get dragged in from people cherry picking bible verses that are vaguely similar enough, and to some of them, if its in the bible, its never wrong.

Also it's people who want to think of themselves as "in the know".

Simply because the Austrians had negotiations where they agreed to be politically neutral during the Cold War, just like Switzerland was neutral in the world wars. So Austria became a buffer zone between East and West that suited both sides. Allowing the Soviets to moved their manpower elsewhere where they were more needed.

@@notmenotme614 Austria was one of the major powers of the triple alliance in ww1 and one of the main reasons that ww1 took place was the assassination at Sarajevo and Austria's ten point ultimatum to Serbia being rejected, and Austria's declaration of war on Serbia causing Russia to declare war and make the triple entente have war with the triple alliance. Austria was also involved in ww2 by unifying with Germany in the Anschluss even though they were not allowed to unify according to the treaties of Saint German and Versailles, and as the UK started ww2 as it declared war on Germany for annexating west of Poland, it technically also declared war on Austria as apart of Germany. Also the formerly Soviet occupied zone in Austria has a lot of mines and natural resources that Soviets were always looking for and the strategic city of Vienna. Most suspiciously, as the Soviets left there in 1955, as they just had announced leaving the area 3 months earlier, they never ever gave any reason for doing so, and even though Austria was neutral, it was pretty much towards the west of the Iron Curtain, similar to Switzerland. By the way Soviets would definitely prioritize their manpower for keeping their sattleight states as they always did (at least till pre-Gorbachev).

@@thegreatman8258 There were many different reasons for WW1 such as the political rivalry between the UK and Germany, both wanted to be the dominant superpower. And territory claims or border disputes between France and Germany. European politics at the time was a pressure vessel waiting for an event, such as the assassination, to cause it to explode. Austria was annexed by Germany in the 1930s, it didn’t voluntarily unify. There was no reason for the Soviet Union to remain in Austria after it declared its neutrality in 1955.

It’s not like politicians to lie and cover up.

It's never the conspiracy theories that turn out to have been true conspiracies. The actual conspiracies are the ones that nobody asked or thought about beforehand.

@@vurpo7080 That's an amazing statement given the numerous conspiracies that many have asked and thought about beforehand that turned out to be fact.