You might (or not) have heard about Shakespeare not actually being himself. This might sound crazy, but the idea is that according to many the man from the Stratford on Avon could not have written those plays and poems. So who did? (The writing contains links to different theories).
And why would that be even moderately interesting to people who live today? I mean: somebody wrote those plays in 16th century, right? That is supposed to be some man, right? They were written and will not be unwritten even if we wouldn’t know for sure, who was the writer. This shows that even established scholars can be conspiracy theorists.
I love to read Shakespeare and watch him performed, whether the plays were written by the lowly actor or respectable philosopher or some magnificent nobleman (some of these people only insterst modern readers because they might have been Shakespeare). I cannot relate to him anyway nor imagine him in detail, because a) he is a man and b) he lived 500 years ago. Case seems closed to me, but not for some people. They continue the ponder on the question, even if they cannot ever come to any certain conclusion as nobody can go and peek behind the writers back.
The idea that somebody else used the name of the actor and director Shakespeare is not as fabulous as it first seems. There are several cases of people concealing behind the false names in the later history of literature. The Elizabethan time was rather risky due to capricious queen. The time was risky also for low play-writers as the Christopher Marlowe’s fate in the hands of early and unnatural death shows to us.
“Shakespeare” wrote quite bold political plays and certain persons had more to loose than poor actor, who had in this case more to gain than loose in this risky game he seemed to play. Yet some people were not in the position to publish any plays in the soil of England as they might have been expelled or escaped from the country.
The reasons behind the doubt are connected to on the other hand the wide vocabulary of the plays (almost sixfold of the amount in the King James Bible, written in the same century) and on the other hand the low education of the Stratford man. According to the documents connected to his death there seems to not have been any books in his possession at the time of death. There were also several plays published posthumously.
Some also note that according to the reminds Shakespeare’s handwriting was poor like he would’ve been illiterate. Yet one knows this can be said of some people (who are even well educated) even today. Not everybody has good handwriting. Chaplin noted that there were no trace of humble setting in the Shakespeare’s plays, but that was common to the all settings of British Renaissance plays.
This could be reversed: the plays in fact show the low life that very few aristocrats could have been aware of. At least in the 17th century he was not considered an expert of the court. The writers geographic knowledge seems to not have been excellent, except what comes to flora around the Warwickshire, the area were he was born and raised.
Some have noted that the style changes from the romantic comedies to the political plays. What if Shakespeare really rote those comedies, but not the political drama. Yet even this might matter more for literary students than average reader or even professional actor. And main stream theories still continue to state that the author (as long as better proof is not given) was in fact the man from Stratford, the Bard of Avon.
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