Who wrote Shakespeare?
The question says more about you than him
A taste of the latest from Prospect online: Jonathan Healey
Could a glover’s son from a provincial town really have created some of the greatest literature ever written? They deny it, but for those who doubt the “man from Stratford” wrote the Shakespeare plays, this question lies at the heart of the issue.
The authors of the “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare”—which, since Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi first pushed it a decade ago has attracted 4,000 plus signatories— are incredulous that a man who grew up in an “illiterate household” in “remote agricultural” Stratford could be such a sublime genius. There’s no evidence he travelled; nor did he go to university. How, they ask, could such a man have written The Merchant of Venice, or the Sonnets? “The works,” they argue, show extensive knowledge of “law, philosophy, classical literature, history, mathematics, astronomy, art, music” and more. “Nothing,” they conclude, “that we know about Mr Shakspere [sic] accounts for this.”