My undergraduate field of study is English Drama from the Early-Modern period, so I've encountered this question in several classes.
There is no evidence whatsoever that "William Shakespeare" DIDN'T write his plays. All such theories are conjecture, based on the fact that, from what we know, the man from Stratford-Upon-Avon called William Shakespeare only had a grammar school education (the modern-day equivalent is a high school diploma).
Most playwrights of the time had a similar education, among them Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Thomas Kyd had a slightly better education, but not by much; still, he penned THE SPANISH TRAGEDY, one of the most influential and well-written plays of the period. Shakespeare was from a working-class family (his father was a glove-maker) -- again not that different from the background of many playwrights working during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras.
Still, no one quite wrote with the sheer breadth of human understanding and linguistic complexity of Shakespeare. The only people who might rival his wordplay and grasp of blank verse are Christopher Marlowe, who he died young just as Shakespeare's career took off, and Ben Jonson, whose style and tone is distinctly different from Shakespeare's. Francis Bacon is a name that gets thrown around a lot, but there's little connecting Bacon to the kind of populist theatre that Shakespeare wrote.
Although we don't know as much about Shakespeare as we'd like, we still know more about his life than almost every other playwright of the period, except for perhaps Ben Jonson. He was certainly one of the wealthiest playwrights of the time, due to his financial investment in the Globe theatre. There is also a myth that he wasn't appreciated in his time; while it's true that theatre was considered a populist and worthless artform (much like television is today) that paled in comparison to poetry, Shakespeare was still only one of three playwrights to have his work published in folio form (posthumously), the others being Jonson and the writing team, Beaumont & Fletcher. The publication of a folio is indicative of the amount of respect Shakespeare garnered from his peers, that they should publish his collected plays in a binding typically reserved only for poetry and other great works.
The question of who "really" wrote Shakespeare's plays isn't really taken seriously by academics. My opinion is that there's little point to the question itself: we have the plays and sonnets, and we've collected them under the banner of "William Shakespeare." Whether the person who wrote these works actually lived under that name is unimportant; what's important is that the works exist for our study.
BlueWizard's blog: The Rambling Corner
HEDWIG: "The road is my home. In reflecting upon the people whom I have come upon in my travels, I cannot help but think of the people who have come upon me."
Updated On: 4/13/05 at 02:43 AM
