Humans have been funky for a long time

Kudos to the narrator.

Yes,"but of course Shakespeare is supreme" lovely way to end his lecture, I love the bard I only know about ten of his plays and a few sonnets ,so beautiful so profound, even to me.

True. That’s the great Grover Gardner narrating.

I can always appreciate when someone points out flaws in Shakespeare's style or work. He is so mythologized that reasonable critic actually gives way to a fantasy of idolism or personal ideology. Shakespeare was supremely playful, and certainly expressed a vitality seldom attempted, but certainly achieved by others in degrees. Shakespeare is like an Aristotle of the grounded life --through the generalizations of theater; and history has rightly celebrated and studied Aristotle.

Tolstoy's critique amounts to "It's not how I would've written it."

his style of reworking older material is a kin to Modernism.

I think we rely too heavily on authorship, imagine ... once a person died, their life's works would be attributed to one's place of birth, in this case Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Discussions of who William Shakespeare would be left to die an intimit death with the family that loved him. Self perpetuating worship isn't standing on the shoulders of giants, it's kicking them in the shins.

Part One: "(That's the spelling of his name on both his birth and death certificate)." Where might someone find these birth and death certificates? You seem to have access to previously undisclosed and unheard of documentation from Shakespeare's era. "In fact, Shakespeare may have been illiterate, like his wife and daughter were." You also seem to exist in a parallel universe where Shakespeare had only one daughter, not the two-Susanna and Judith-that existed in our timeline. Susanna left an extant signature, along with her daughter Elizabeth, was described as "witty above her sex" on her epitaph, probably wrote the epitaph for her mother Anne, and was capable of accurately describing the contents of a book of her husband's case notes even though they were in Latin. That would seem to be substantial evidence for literacy. And though we don't have as good evidence for the literacy of Judith-or for her mother Anne-that is no reason to conclude that they had to be illiterate. Not that it seems to make any difference in any case. As for Shakespeare being illiterate, you accept that he was an actor, but if you actually had done the "research" you pay lip service to you'd know that in this era actors had to be able to read cue scripts, which were scrolls with their lines and one or two preceding lines of dialogue to function as a cue. "The 6 differing signatures extant, all spelled differently" They aren't "spelled differently"; they're abbreviated differently. In all but the most heavily abbreviated signature, Shakespeare is consistent in the first seven letters of his surname, while abbreviating his first name with recognized scriveners' abbreviations like Willm. and Wm.-the latter is still a recognized abbreviation for "William". In any case, since Shakespeare's era was two hundred years before the introduction of standardized spelling and there are plenty of variable spellings of names in this era-Christopher Marlowe and Walter Raleigh are two well-known examples-what importance does this have to Shakespeare's authorship? "...all on legal documents, may have been written by clerks." Who coincidentally all happened to have a single consistent handwriting? Pull the other one, it's got bells on it. "There are no known letters from him to anybody...." There are no known letters from most of Shakespeare's contemporary writers. All we have from Christopher Marlowe, for example, is one signature where he spells his name either "Marley" or "Marloy". Of the few that survive, they're always in official archives of some sort, such as government archives (e.g., the letters Ben Jonson wrote begging to be let out of prison) or in institutional archives (e.g., the letters Gabriel Harvey wrote to Cambridge begging for employment). Considering that there was no mail service for the ordinary members of the public until Charles I instituted it, it's hardly surprising that there aren't more letters from Shakespeare's time, aside from the difficulties of preserving them if they didn't end up in some sort of archive. However, there is an extant letter _to_ William Shakespeare, which would be an odd thing to write if he were known to be illiterate. "no manuscripts" There is the three manuscript pages of Hand D of _Sir Thomas More_ , which has been analyzed by paleographers as a match to those signatures you claim were written by clerks, who were evidently moonlighting as playwrights and using imagery, expressions, and lines that tie the Hand D manuscript to the canonical works of Shakespeare. Strangely, the paleographers who analyzed these exemplar signatures failed to note that they were not in the same handwriting. "he had virtually no library" How have you established that? What, precisely, is "virtually no library", and how does it compare to the private libraries of other men of Shakespeare's class? "it's not even known if he attended elementary school in Stratford" Actually, that is known because they didn't have "elementary school" in the early modern era. They had dame schools and they had grammar schools. Once again, you're showing that you haven't actually done the "research" you claim. In Stratford-upon-Avon, the local grammar school was free to all boys in the town, which makes the inference that Shakespeare attended it probable. We don't have any class rolls for the school before 1800, but I don't suppose that the building stood empty except for a schoolmaster for the first 250 years of its existence. "much less learned Latin or law," Grammar schools existed to teach Latin. That is why they were called _grammar_ schools. Latin was the language of all university education, so students needed to be fluent in it before arriving, so grammar schools were created to bring the population up to speed. As for the law, the majority of legal analogies in Shakespeare's works are to property law and the law of wills, which are the two places where Shakespeare shows up in the legal record. His legal analogies do not suggest any training in the subject when compared to the works of his contemporary playwrights, most of whom were not trained lawyers either. His one depiction of a legal trial in the canon, in the fourth act of _The Merchant of Venice_ , is farcically inaccurate. "...or the myriad other subjects detailed in the plays." And how much Latin do you imagine is in the plays? Barely any. Shakespeare used fewer classical allusions than almost all of his contemporary playwrights and 90% of the ones he used trace back to a single book, Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ , which was a common grammar school set-text. The minimal Latin that is in the plays would not be outside the reach of someone who attended grammar school. Shakespeare-deniers aren't judging according to the standards of the era, but to contemporary standards when high schools that teach Latin are few and far between and anyone who has ever studied the language looks like a savant. "There are no known life-time portraits...." On the contrary, the Chandos portrait, for example, dates from Shakespeare's lifetime. Now, if what you're saying is that we don't have any independent proof that the portrait represents Shakespeare, that is true, but it's also the case for all portraits painted before the advent of photography. Even the depictions of royalty and the nobility might not be accurate representations for all we know. But what does this have to do with Shakespeare being an author? Is there a "must have an authenticated portrait with an indisputable provenance" requirement to being a playwright and poet in this era? "until the bizarre frontispiece to the First Folio by Droeshout, which in itself is full of 'errors' and probably shows a mask, not a portrait." "Probably" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in that comment. And yes, it is full of errors because Martin Droeshout was an inexperienced engraver when he did the frontispiece for the First Folio. There are a lot of other extant engravings he did that show the same errors, so these errors are not unique to the First Folio nor do they indicate that the depicted person is a "mask". Droeshout's portrait of Thomas Coventry, 1st Baron Coventry and Keeper of the Great Seal, features at least as many oddities as the First Folio engraving, including the line going up to the ear that Shakespeare-deniers purport to take to be 'proof' of a mask.

Part Two: "The research on this is fascinating." 'Research' is a pretty euphemistic way of putting what is just fact-free speculation. "The statue of Shakspere in Stratford, re-modeled from an earlier funerary statue of his father, looks nothing like any other 'portrait', and indeed shows him to be the wool merchant he actually was." Case in point. There is absolutely no evidence that John Shakespeare ever had a funerary monument, the monument is a scholar monument that depicts Shakespeare in a subfusc, which would have been inappropriate for his father, and it contains a Latin inscription that likens Shakespeare to "a Virgil for art" ("arte Maronem"-Virgil's cognomen was Maro) and in English a bit of verse saying that "all that he hath writ | Leaves living art but page to serve his wit". What artistic works did John Shakespeare write? What did he do that justified him being likened to Virgil? A bit of extravagant praise for a "wool merchant", isn't it? Furthermore, those inscriptions were seen and copied down by John Weever for a book he planned to write within a few years of the installation of the monument (no later than 1618-19). Alongside his copy of the inscription, Weever wrote "William Shakespeare the famous Poet". In 1623, Leonard Digges referenced Shakespeare's "Stratford monument" in a verse titled "To the Deceased Author, Master William Shakespeare". In the 1630s, Lieutenant Hammond came through Stratford with his company and wrote down his remembrance of "a neat monument of that famous poet William Shakespeare, who was born here". And in the 1640s, William Dugdale sketched Shakespeare's monument and then wrote, in his _Antiquities of Warwickshire_ , “One thing more, in reference to this antient Town is observable, that it gave birth and sepulture to our late famous Poet Will. Shakespere, whose Monument I have inserted in my discourse of the Church.” However, it is Dugdale's schematic sketch and Wenceslaus Hollar's even more inaccurate engraving that the Shakespeare-deniers are eyeballing to claim that it 'proves' William Shakespeare was a "wool merchant", while ignoring their very own source in what he directly affirms about Shakespeare's life! I know reading is hard for Shakespeare-deniers, but they really should really give some attention to the words and not just look at pictures. Four 17th century witnesses to Shakespeare's funerary monument all say that he was a poet/author. Two of them explicitly affirm that he was born in Stratford, including the guy whose image they're using to make their fantastic claims about the monument. This is "research"? This is scholarship? In a pig's eye. "When Shakspere died, there were no obituaries, mention among other poets..nothing..." How many "obituaries" were there for any of Shakespeare's contemporaries? It would be pretty difficult to have any considering that there were no newspapers. Again, you're applying an anachronistic lens to the early modern era, which shows that your claims to have done "research" are hollow. As for no mention among other poets, what do you call William Basse's elegy "On Mr. Wm. Shakespeare He Dyed Aprill 1616", as it is titled in at least one manuscript copy? It was so famous and so widely reproduced that we have several dozen extant manuscripts and half a dozen printed editions, and its image of Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont making room for Shakespeare was explicitly referenced in Ben Jonson's commendatory poem in the First Folio. For that matter, what do you call the First Folio itself? Because I know what John Heminges and Henry Condell said about it. They said it was their way of memorializing their "Friend &, Fellow", whom they identified as "SHAKESPEARE", "by the humble offer of his plays...." So yeah, there was 'nothing' to memorialize Shakespeare... if you ignore all the things that were done to memorialize Shakespeare. "He never traveled abroad, although several of the plays are highly detailed descriptions of Italy." You've established that he "never traveled abroad"... how? For that matter, there are no "highly detailed descriptions of Italy" in the plays, especially when compared to works by his fellow early modern playwrights. Once again, you have to examine Shakespeare's 'knowledge' in context, not just because if his contemporaries could have it then so could he, but also because their plays could have been a _source_ for his supposed 'knowledge'. If he lived in a context where plays set in Italy were common and legal analogies abounded-and he did-then asking how he got his knowledge of these subjects is beside the point. Also, there are clear errors in his Italian plays that it's unlikely anyone who had been there would commit, such as giving Venice a "Duke" when it hadn't had one since the 9th century, making a plot point turn on free motion for Jews in Venice at night when the Jews were locked in the ghettos at sundown, and throughout his career thinking that Milan was a navigable seaport (an error he makes as early as _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ and continues in through to _The Tempest_ ). "...the actual fact that he couldn't have been the author of these plays involving the highest levels of government and social history and manners." Again, have you read _anything_ by Shakespeare's contemporaries? All of their history plays and virtually all of their tragedies (though the "domestic tragedy" was getting started in this era with _Arden of Faversham_ ) are about the "highest levels of government and social history and manners". It's only in the comedies where it was routine to have working- or middle-class figures as leading characters (e.g., _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ , Thomas Dekker's _The Shoemaker's Holiday_ , etc.). What you need to explain is how Shakespeare could get these things so wrong, as he frequently does in his plays. Here's one insuperable hurdle to the idea that Shakespeare was any sort of nobleman: in _Richard III_ , Richard, still Duke of Gloucester at this point, addresses one person as three people: he refers to "Lord Rivers", "Lord Woodville" and "Lord Scales". Anthony Woodville was the 2nd Earl Rivers, and one of the subsidiary styles that went with this rank was Lord Scales. Oxford would have been alert to this fact. His family name was de Vere, the title was Oxford, and his subsidiary styles were Viscount Bulbeck (until Henry, his son, was born) and Lord of Escales and Badlesmere. Any nobleman or -woman of Shakespeare's era would have been alert to the possibility of the title being different from the family name and the possibility of subsidiary styles, but the playwright was _not_ . Ergo, the playwright was not of the nobility. "But de Vere's life coordinated perfectly was the characters of many plays, including The Tempest, and particularly Hamlet." Oh, yes, who can forget the time when Edward de Vere was deposed of his title by his brother and hustled onto a leaky hulk with his daughter (only one or all three? Of course, there's a problem with him being in the same tub as any of them, because Father of the Year Ned dumped them on William Cecil to raise). Fortunately, he came to an island where he used his magic power to free a sprite imprisoned in a tree and subdue a humanoid creature called Caliban. Sounds just like a man who spent the 1590s begging for tin concessions in Cornwall. Or Hamlet, that must be Edward de Vere's life story. Because his father was poisoned (he wasn't) and his mother hastily remarried (she didn't) to de Vere's uncle (he wasn't), a man whom he hated (actually de Vere got on well with his stepfather) and who denied de Vere his rightful title (actually the title passed to de Vere in the conventional way). Of course, we mustn't neglect the other relationships in the play: Hamlet rejects Ophelia before they were able to be married (de Vere actually wedded Anne Cecil) and accidentally slays her father (de Vere didn't), so she went mad (Anne is not recorded to have done so) and drowned herself (Anne Cecil lived another 17 years after their marriage, but perhaps she was wearing her water-wings and that's why it took so long). After which Anne's brother, of course, challenged Edward de Vere to a fencing bout with a poisoned rapier (no, nothing like that happened), and Hamlet in the last moments kills not only this brother, but also the reigning monarch (Elizabeth didn't die this way), while the spouse of the monarch (which Elizabeth didn't have) dies by a cup of poison. Oh, yeah, but there was that one time that Edward de Vere was robbed by pirates. Pirates! Of course! That's the similarity. Of course, Hamlet wasn't actually robbed by the pirates, but rather he says "they have dealt with me like thieves of mercy", because they recognized they could get more from not maltreating him ("but they knew what they did; I am to do a good turn for them"). Also, Hamlet boarded the pirate vessel willingly during the sea fight ("in the grapple I boarded them"), which de Vere didn't. Oh yeah, it's just point-by-point de Vere's life. How could I have been so blind?

@@Nullifidian I was amazed at your lengthy reply and I appreciated reading what you had to say. I could have used less sarcasm. Of course, my reply to you could be as long as yours to me, since there are many facts which are still speculative and ongoing, many records missing and no manuscripts to the plays or sonnets. But allow me to address your first response about the 'birth and death certificates'..I should have said 'baptismal records' and 'death registry', but I used an inaccurate vernacular. This does not change the fact that on the baptismal registry his name is Shakspere and the same on the death records. You can see for yourself by Googling the images...the death records are hard to read...but Shakespeare doesn't appear..nor does it appear on any of the known six signatures...Perhaps if he'd ever written a letter and signed it, we'd have a clearer idea. I look forward to addressing more of your arguments..

​@@williambland5515 Why do you keep on disregarding the existence of Hand D of _Sir Thomas More_ ? _Sir Thomas More_ is a play. It is in an extant manuscript-in fact, it was never printed in the 17th century, so the manuscript is the basis for all modern printed editions of the play. Personally, I happen to own four different books that print either the whole play or the Hand D portion. And Hand D has been linked by paleographic analysis to William Shakespeare's extant signatures, while stylometric analysis shows that it's consistent with the rest of the Shakespeare canon, and multiple strands of internal evidence also link it to the other plays in the canon, including-most convincingly to my mind-two self-plagiarized phrases that later show up in _Coriolanus_ and _Henry VIII_ . It's exactly what you claim to be looking for, but you completely ignored my telling you about it last time. I also addressed the spelling argument at length. Once again: Shakespeare lived 200 years before the advent of standardized spelling. Plenty of his contemporaries-I offered the examples of Christopher Marlowe and Walter Raleigh-had their names spelt in various ways that differ from the spelling we regard as standard now. Marlowe himself spelled his own name as either "Marley" or "Marloy" on the only extant document with his signature. That does not mean that the "Christofer Marley [or Marloy]" who signed the will was a different man from the one who wrote _Doctor Faustus_ , _Edward II_ , _Tamburlaine_ , etc. Now, I didn't bring this up, because it's a bit technical, but the way English was pronounced changed after Shakespeare's life. We now regard a terminal e as changing the pronunciation of the previous vowel in the word, making it a long vowel rather than a short. For example, just this minute I'm finishing off a Coke Zero, which has a long o because of the terminal e. This is not how Elizabethans pronounced words. Regardless of whether it was spelled "Shakspere" or "Shakespeare", to an Elizabethan they'd both be pronounced roughly like "Shakspur". The two names are equivalent. We can tell because his name is signed to documents that write his name as "Shakespeare" in the text of the documents themselves, such as the mortgage and bargain and sale in the transfer of the Blackfriars gatehouse property. Shakespeare signed both documents, and they have his name spelled as "Shakespeare" in the text throughout. The same thing goes for his deposition in the _Bellot v. Mountjoy_ case and his will. This argument will get you nowhere and it will only show you up as someone who doesn't know anything about the era you're speaking of. If you want the proof, go Google "Shakespeare purchases the Blackfriars Gatehouse: copy of bargain and sale signed by buyers, including Shakespeare" and you'll find the Shakespeare Documented site. Shakespeare's signature is on the seal, but the text of the document gives his name as Shakespeare as we spell it today (e.g., third line down from the top at the far right). Note that it also identifies him as a "gentleman", and of "Stratford-upon-Avon in the county of Warwick", so there's no ambiguity about which Shakespeare is being referred to. You might also note that one of his named trustees in the deal is John Heminges, the King's Men actor who later affirmed, with Henry Condell, that Shakespeare was their "Friend, & Fellow" who wrote the plays in the First Folio that they were offering to the Herbert Brothers for their patronage. John Heminges later transferred the Blackfriars property to trustees of Dr. John and Susanna Hall, née Shakespeare, Shakespeare's son-in-law and eldest daughter in Stratford-upon-Avon. There is so much evidence situating Shakespeare in the early modern theatre as both an actor and a playwright that it's inane to pretend anyone else-beyond Shakespeare's known collaborators-had a hand in Shakespeare's plays. And doubly so when the person in question died ten years before the end of Shakespeare's active career and during his life wrote in a completely incommensurate dialect from Shakespeare's Midlands speech.

Yes, indeed. Quite right.

The Baconian Theory was eclipsed by the Oxfordian Theory. Bacon has a library of written works, not much of it poetic or dramatic. Its unreasonable to think that he has a complete and separate library of dramatic works as well. 2 Facts lead me away from Bacon. Bacon prosecuted the defendants of the Essex Rebellion, but no himself. Essex et al tried to raise a rebellion by staging a revised version of Shakespeare's King John. Shakespeare was never prosecuted for his role, indicating that there was no such person, but if it had been Bacon, he would have been prosecuting himself, which he did not. Also, Bacon was very much alive in 1623 when the First Folio was published, and he is not known to have taken any role in its preperation. Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, has all the education that we believe the Shakespeare had, and although his contemporaries claimed he was the best of the court poets, and that he would be recognized IF his works were published, none of those works - NONE OF HIS WORKS - have passed down to us, at least with his name on them. Also, the plots and characters throughout virtually all of Shakespeare's Works can be related to Vere's life - something that can't be done with Will Shakspere of Stratford or Bacon or any other poet of the day.

Thank you Stephen for your reply. A friend of mine is convinced that Bacon is the real author of Shakespeare's works. This will give us something to talk about. Upon the outcome of discussing it with him I might return to hopefully get more of your comments. Thank you again.

Please excuse me for misspelling your name.

What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? I hope I am correct in assuming that Brendah is a young lady's name?

Dear Steven, in response to your comment, I have had a 2 hour discussion with my friend on this subject of who the real Shakespeare is. This chap is really a good thinker. He isn't rash or dogmatic. And he can without interruption listen to the other guys point of view. And in fairness to him I must say that he has really done much research. It's almost his life's work, but as it's not really his forte to be able to respond with the pen, I am doing it for him. But its not easy. In his opinion and he has good reasons for this, he says that it appears that the who's who of the day did know that it was Bacon's work and so did the queen. She certainly knew because it is recorded that she said that "Richard the 2nd " was actually all about her. Her spies would have told her it was Bacon's work. This is a discussion in itself. But there is a big difference between Essex who leads a rebellion compared to Bacon who writes some plays with double meanings, which wasn't worthy of severe punishment, especially as it was difficult to prove, that some of them were written about her. The plot thickens when the idea that Bacon is actually the illegitimate son of Dudley and Elizabeth. Although this idea or notion is initially rather repugnant to many nevertheless it does appear to stand up to some initial scrutiny. I'm not sure if it makes any difference if Bacon is alive or dead in 1623 when the first folio gets published. Perhaps you could explain this Steven. It does seem apparent that Bacon was a genius of the highest order. But this doesn't mean that Shakespeare wasn't one too and he might well have been. But it's highly probable that he would have been somewhat deficient in all the history and intricacies of the royal court, which really was required to write those plays. As it is with all conspiracy theories, they are hard to prove or be absolutely sure of. Nevertheless talking about them can be profitable as it's educational and enjoyable. But perhaps if we just keep kicking this most interesting of footballs, back and forth a bit more, there's no telling where it might end up.

so what really after all this time can't we enjoy the play rather than who the fuck wrote it i love how under every biography of famous people someone exists to try to show how smart he is by only showing a conclusion which only is a hypothesis and then tries to destroy the person does it change the plays who wrote them no just go live your life instead of calling someone petty who didn't hurt you

For me personally it actually opens up the plays and poems even more, because De Vere had an obsession for occultism and numerology you can actually see some craft in 'Shakespeare'. Through this there is a whole underbelly of work underneath the artistry, a lot of playwrights and poets at the time would create complex ciphers, even Ben Johnson appears to have created ciphers in the First Folio. It is an undiscovered aspect of Elizabethan history. And for a young writer like me, it makes me want to master the craft that they also excelled at.

Would you consider elaborating this in the form of an article? I would be more than happy to pay you for that piece.

Was an untalented minor poet less known at court for his poetry than for breaking wind in front of the queen and introducing a fashion for scented gloves.

Or perhaps it's the Anglicization of the name Amleth, which is recorded in Saxo Grammaticus' _Gesta Danorum_ . But perhaps Bacon also wrote the _Gesta Danorum_ as well... after he invented a time machine.