Uncovering the Real Shakespeare

Lastly, The director of Anonymous states that there are no educational records or any other records connecting to Shakespeare. It is nearly impossible to gain the amount of knowledge Shakespeare had with out going to school. There are no records to prove that Shakespeare ever attended the Stratford grammar school, yet the work of who really wrote these plays shows extensive knowledge about medicine, astronomy, art, music, military, law, philosophy, and activities such as royal tennis and falconry (Ten reason). It is unbelievable for one to know all that without even a trace of school. This suggests that some one else wrote the plays because Shakespeare does not have the education and knowledge to do so. Likewise, it is strange how one knows so much about foreign countries without ever leaving their country. Shakespeare’s records show that he has never left

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend. Nativity, once in the main of light, Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d, Crooked elipses ’gainst his glory fight, And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.

Many Elizabethan bedsides were haunted from “the terrors of the night”. Back then their ghosts were nothing like the pasty blobs we call ghosts now. Theirs were quite gruesome. Ghostly visitations were claimed to have been very unpleasant. Not only this, but they claimed it cast them into a state of spiritual confusion.

One of the most argued cases in history is whether or not William Shakespeare was the one to write his own plays, or if he had someone else write them for him. There are numerous amounts of arguments agreeing that Shakespeare wrote his plays, and then there are numerous amounts disagreeing with his penmanship of “his” plays. According to some sources, Shakespeare was an impractical choice to write such famous works of art due to his lack of traveling, and his lack of education (Hechinge). These theories come into play when explaining that Shakespeare was, indeed, a fraud.

The large body of work attributed to William Shakespeare shows education, experience, creativity, and wisdom far beyond what many people are willing to accept came from a single author. Due to the scarcity of facts surrounding Shakespeare’s life, speculation arouse about whether or not he actually wrote his works became more common. In the mid-1800s ideas about other authors were brought forward. However, these theories have little sustenance, and it is likely that the entire body of work attributed to Shakespeare in fact belonged to Shakespeare himself.

      Abstract:  The debate over the legitimacy of the authorship of Shakespearean works has been disputed for centuries. While many scholars have held beliefs that Shakespeare's works have been written by figures such as Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, William Stanley, and others, the most heated debate today is between William Shakespeare and Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford. Each side of this debate has many followers, the Stratfordians, or those who claim Shakespeare to be the true author, and the Oxfordians who believe that true credit should go to DeVere. My paper, far from being a complete analysis of the possibilities of Shakespearean authorship, attempts to summarize and rationalize the

William Shakespeare, the third of eight children born, was born in 1564 from the rural town of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. William, along with his seven siblings, grew up in the middle class with his mother, Mary Arden, and father, John Shakespeare, who was a successful glove maker. Shakespeare grew up and met his wife Anne Hathaway. Records show William and his wife got married in 1582. The theory has been proposed that “Shakespeare, at the age of 18, was forced to marry Anne, since their first child, Susanna, was born about six months” after their wedding (Forster). Currently, Shakespeare is most known for writing 37 plays that are then divided into comedies, tragedies, and histories along with 154 sonnets (Forster). Nonetheless, several scholars doubt the authorship William Shakespeare. However, the question of Shakespeare’s Authorships did not begin recently. In fact, the question arose in the late eighteenth century (Goldman).

To start from the beginning of the controversy, the earliest actual documentation of such findings began in 1785 by an oxford scholar named James Wilmot. It was here that when James came up “empty-handed” of any evidence of Shakespeare’s plays did he come to the conclusion that it had to have been someone else and that someone was Sir Francis Bacon. James however never reported anything and on his deathbed actually destroyed his writings, but not before telling a fellow scholar, James Corton Cowell, his findings. Cowell would leave and make a presentation to the Ipswich Philosophic Society, and so began the greatest mystery of whether William Shakespeare was a famous playwright or a fraud taking credit for the work of someone else.

The Shakespeare name is known by almost everyone. The true identity of the great writer is still a mystery. There isn’t a single picture to portray the true identity of Shakespeare. When you look at the pictures they are different and resemble someone else. We know that he was a well educated business man, knowledgeable in the law and Royalty just for starters. The man credited with the works doesn’t poses these qualities. Over the years, more people ask the same question, who was the true Shakespeare?

Although Earl De Vere is the most likely candidate to have authored Shakespeare’s work, there are other alternative possibilities such as Francis Bacon and a group of individual writers. Francis Bacon was a famous philosopher of this time period, who kept company and traveled with other well educated aristocrats. (bbcamerica.com) Bacon’s travels as well as his social rank make him a notable contender as an alternate writer of Shakespearean plays. “As a leading figure of the English Renaissance, he certainly had the biography for it: educated at Cambridge, widely traveled, Bacon was a famous philosopher, one of the inventors of the scientific method,

In addition to the contribution of establishing Shakespeare’s authorship, Pavier and Jaggard largely protected Shakespeare’s manuscripts and presented more authentic works of Shakespeare by referring widely to the resources they could get assessed. Their method of editing could be considered as “critical editing”, which aims to represent the author’s final intention by comparative analysis of multiple texts(Evenden, 2016, p.54-55). Most of the Folio text, according to Jowett(2007), involve a more complicated cross- fertilization, which means the Folio texts must have absorbed various copies of previous quartos and theatrical manuscript to include longer passages(p. 77). The more complicated work of the printers, the direct or indirect referring

The question of the authorship of Shakespeare’s writings has been a highly debated topic for centuries. The main reason for the doubt of Shakespeare’s authorship, is the shear extensiveness of his work. Many doubt that one man could have written so much on his own; 37 plays, 154 sonnets, 5 poems. It is believed that either his plays were either a collaboration, or were simply not written by Shakespeare at all.

Concluding his argument, he introduced the idea that scripts are like the Renaissance because they only existed to put on a play. Bevington proposes that we do not need to know everything about Shakespeare’s life, nor do we need all his handwriting samples and manuscripts. For example, we don’t even have any manuscripts of plays by some of the other famous playwrights such as Jonson, Marlowe or Webster, so why does Shakespeare seem like the only victim being picked on? Bevington makes a very good point that Oxford, being along the many other claimants to the true author only, make us more curious as to try to find an answer to a problem that may not actually exist. He closes by saying that this case crashes altogether because of the lack of motive and evidence that Shakespeare isn’t the true author by trying to find some other bard to fit this great genius’ profile. I find Bevington’s argument to be very in depth, defensive and vastly persuasive on behalf of the Stratfordian point of view.

Shakespeare was real though he was not just one person, but a group of different writers. There have been other theories that state that Shakespeare was a penname for another writer. The theory that Shakespeare was not a person, but a group of men was first posed by the New York lawyer and journalist named Joseph C Hart in 1848. In Hart’s book, The Romance of Yachting, he asks, “the enquiry will be, who were the able literary men who wrote the dramas imputed to him?” (Hart). Hart believed in this theory, but he did not dig deeper to find out more about who the group was. In contrast, the woman named Delia Bacon wrote an article supporting the same theory. Bacon discusses in depth how she thinks the group of men are prophets of republican America.

As shown in the records of his home church in Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564. However, we tend to place Shakespeare’s birthday three days prior to his baptism, on April 23, 1564. Shakespeare was born to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden. most people claim, although there is no documented evidence, that Shakespeare went to a grammar school that was provided for free in Stratford, where he studied language, Latin, and classical works of the time. However, Shakespeare never furthered his education in any way after his basic schooling.