I’ve never
bought into the argument against Shakespeare of Stratford not authoring the
works he is credited for. It doesn’t make any sense. Yet, still reams of
academic papers and books are written on the subject, scholars divide themselves
into various other camps too numerous to list in detail here (a full list can be found, as with
everything, on Wikipedia). (And then there's that film, Anonymous - the less we say about that, the better.)
The argument
goes something along the lines of ‘how
could one William Shakespeare – the son of a glove-maker, merchant, and
once-Mayor-of-Stratford – a man who was illiterate, whose name is spelt in
twenty-four different ways at least, and who’d probably never left England, how
could this man have been the author of the cornerstone of Western literature?’
The conspiracists conclude that someone of noble birth or standing must’ve been
their logical author, because otherwise it wouldn’t make sense. (Really, they
can’t stand the idea that someone who wrote that many key works of literature
wasn’t born into privilege or wealth).
But what each camp doesn’t actually
realise, is that all of them – Stratfordians, Baconians, Oxfordians,
Marlovians; all of them – agree on the one incontrovertible fact that someone
who called themselves ‘Shakespeare’ wrote thirty-seven plays,
one-hundred-and-fifty-four sonnets, five narrative poems (and that’s just what
we’re certain of). No one is disputing that. All they are disputing is the
exact identity of the writer. It’s a bit like the Cottingley Fairies story – in
1917, two girls aged ten and twelve took a series of five photos which proved
the existence of fairies. The photos are real, but the fairies aren’t; they’re
merely paper-cutouts. By the same token, the fairies are real fairies, albeit
paper ones...
The whole
debate is silly, really – surely, just as with Spartacus, we’re all Shakespeare
in the end?
