Was William Shakespeare a Real Person?

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[o.mcneely]

In my first week of university, I was taking a class on Shakespeare and honestly asked the professor what he thought about the authorship controversy; I was curious because I’d spent a huge chunk of my childhood and teen years acting in Shakespearean plays for the local youth theater group, and had just heard of this issue.

When my prof finished trying not to let out an exasperated sigh, he simply said “almost nobody questions people like Byron or Lovecraft’s authorship, despite the two of them having variable levels of education compared to their social status. So why do people question how someone with a very solid education, but who also happened to be working class, wrote such fascinating and profound works? Why do they question whether a regular person has the capacity to deeply understand love, grief, ambition, vengeance, longing, redemption? Why should only the rich and titled be allowed to express their experiences of those cornerstones of what it means to be human?”

[mmissi]

Abraham Lincoln had less than a year of formal education total. He was completely self educated, yet he wrote some of the most moving, thought provoking, and life changing speeches, executive orders, etc. Formal education is not a must, love of learning is.

[richardwilliams]

Someone ( I want to say Neil Gaiman) once said the whole "who REALLY wrote Shakespeare" movement was literary snobbery that a "regular" person could write those works.

[davidandrews]

My grandfather was the son of an illiterate sharecropper, who taught himself to read, and got himself through the academic jungle to the point where he studied for a PhD in Chemistry at Columbia University.

[rasputinsbeard]

"Not possible that a single man wrote all of those plays by himself?", laughed Stephen King.

[the-chillian]

I like how one of the objections to Shakespeare as author was that he sometimes spelled his name differently, and in the ad read Simon explains how an ancestor just suddenly started spelling his surname differently for no apparent reason.

[pamelamays]

Simon recites Shakespeare, gets a scholarship.
Legend!

[spudgunn]

What made me laugh was, "how could he have written so much in that timescale?" He wrote for a living. Have these people never heard of Barbara Cartland, Enid Blyton, Terry Pratchett, Agatha Christie, Piers Antony, Isaac Asimov... I could go on, but I think the point is made. If you write for a living, you tend to write a lot!!

[PlutoniumBoss]

It's basically the same as asserting the ancient Egyptians couldn't have built the pyramids without modern tools, because of course we in the modern era are so much smarter and more sophisticated that those primitives.

[EddieAntis]

To me the theory that Shakespeare was someone else is on the same level as those Ancient Alien crackpots that just can’t believe people in the past could accomplish things

[fridayhunt]

THANK YOU!!!

I've never heard anyone else bring up the fact that these plays aren't just poetry, they're written for performances - not just masques for the court - for trying to make a living entertaining people in innyards, not just theaters.

They're written for actors - with lots of bantering and big juicy parts, not just poetry in the mouths of a few main characters.

Especially, great roles for women. No one else writes female characters even *remotely* like real people.

Who actually performed in a play? Shakespeare.

You can't just ask someone about pacing, banter and giving and taking focus. You need practice and feedback.

I just can't see that from anyone with a title putting an effort into entertaining the groundlings (in a way that doesn't insult the intelligence of a modern audience).

These plays aren't just poetry, they're groundbreaking theater – lightyears more naturalistic than anything else in history and fundamentally different from what everyone else was doing.

It makes no sense to me that the very people who acclaim these plays as works of genius, refuse to believe that the son of a wealthy pillar of his village who had to learn Latin and Greek, memorize *swaths* of the greatest plays in Latin, could possibly be enough of a genius to go on to be such a successful playwright.

The reason that these plays are performed, popular enough to still make money, and not just studied by lit majors like me, is that they were written by a man who knew how to act, entertain a mixed crowd, and give each different character their own voice and life.

[doclewis]

Considering most people aren't remembered at all, going down in history for insulting the Bard is something (apparently) worth being remembered for because he made an impact in some way.

[LiveFreeOrDieA]

After doing family history genealogy research, that if I was able to trace an ancestor back to England that records were actually BETTER during this time period than they were from the mid-1800’s to early-1900’s. I’ve found detailed dates for both male and female ancestor lineages with well kept birth, baptism, marriage, death dates

[nysunflower]

My great grandfather was a farmer, born in the late 1800’s. He had very little education, but he had a room in his house he called the library. I have a table from that room the family calls the library table. In that library were first edition novels and a leather bound full collection of the works of Shakespeare.

[Stroheim]

An evidence (from preserved documents!) that Shakespeare wrote his own plays: He had a son called Hamnet, and by Shakespeare himself spelled Hamlett in his will, who died 11 years old, 3 years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. Nobody had called the mythological character Amledo that before, and it was simply a homage to his son.

[KE]

Shakespeare could easily have been born with a genius IQ. He could definitely have been an autodidact and he DID actually know A LOT of people and Actors who travelled, including his actor friend who travelled to Denmark where he visited and performed at the very Castle - Kronborg Castle in Helsingør (Elsinore) that became the setting for none other than Hamlet…. As an actor he would have mixed with multitudes of different people who told stories of travel to faraway lands which Shakespeare could’ve then used in his plays. His best friends who were left various moneys and gifts in his will - Richard Burbage (c.1571-1619) and Thomas Combe (1589 –1657) who came from very different backgrounds, Burbage was well-known to everyone from the monarchs, Queen Elizabeth I and King James I, to the regular playgoers at the Globe. All London mourned when he died probably quite suddenly at the age of 50 and his death came at the same time as Queen Anne, completely overshadowing her. The Combe family were close friends of William Shakespeare, they were a wealthy family of landowners and lawyers. So here we see two best friends of Shakespeare who respectively, were well versed in the events and protocols at the Palace and Law courts at the time. To suggest that they didn’t tell stories of their lives to Shakespeare and even inspire some of his plays and the characters therein is ridiculous. He didn’t have to travel - he knew enough people who did and brought back stories and painted literary pictures for Shakespeare to reference in his works. We have geniuses born today, people who are polymaths (a person of wide knowledge or learning) and autodidacts (people who are completely self-taught), so why is it difficult to believe that Shakespeare could’ve been EXACTLY this type of person ???? In my humble opinion it’s all down to academic snobbery and jealousy that a middle class, lowly actor and playwright with many friends who were better travelled and far wealthier than he, became the world’s greatest playwright and wrote sonnets and plays that we’re still watching or reading today.

[annasutton]

I found out as an adult that the prolific Franklin W Dixon (author of the Hardy Boys books) was a pen name shared by multiple authors and never an actual person and it broke my childhood ☹️

[dees]

Loved it, well written Ilze.
I’d like to see a decoding the unknown about the imagery and secret messages in portraits and other paintings. The Tudor were famous for this, but others did it too. There is some really interesting stuff around the Tudor perception of how brains worked in relation to visual stimulation which is relevant. There’s a good podcast called Tudor neuroscience on YouTube, I think the channel was ‘on the Tudor trail’ which has a good introduction to this,

[Raventooth]

Actually being remembered for throwing feces down a pipe 500 years later is probably more than most of us will be remembered.

[holton]

The paper reuse idea is very true. So was the workmanlike "git 'er done" attitude of writers (collaboration or taking over and finishing a work) was also very real. This was a money-making venture for the writer and not considered to be "high art" as we view it today. For instance, JS Bach, one of the greatest composers of all time in the Western world, wrote many works we have never found. Pieces were composed daily, for use by his patron or church. They were rarely repeated. New work justified the money of patronage, not the repetition of old "used" work. Some of Bach's pieces were discovered when someone found them being used as wrapping for fish or kitchen trash by the household cooking staff. So our tendency to save everything and set it aside for posterity would have been ridiculed by composers, playwrights, authors, or poets.