Was Shakespeare Himself?

Was Shakespeare Himself?

 A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Romeo and Juliet are just a few of Shakespeare's 37 plays. For a man of this time it makes you wonder, how can a man write so many plays? How can he write them so beautifully, funny, or interesting? Well, the answers to those questions are he didn't write all of his plays.  There are many theories to who wrote his plays.

William Shakespeare was an English playwright and poet; He is generally considered the greatest dramatist the world has ever known and the finest poet who has written in the English language.   Shakespeare has also been the world's most popular author. No other writer's plays have been produced so many times or read so widely in so many countries. William's father was a glove maker and later a local politician. His mother was affluent.  Shakespeare was born in 1564, in Stratford - on - Avon, England.. “The interregnum between youth and adulthood has been the subject of much speculation, due to the utter lack of records that indicate where he was or what he was doing.” ( Sloan, Sam) At age eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway and had three children. Then he pops up in London years later, He died aged fifty two in 1616.

A theory that the author of the plays was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.  Oxford was a brilliant, well-educated aristocrat with a penchant for poetry, and one of his crests shows a lion shaking a broken spear. Also, the current Lord Burford, a descendant of Oxford, would really like him to be the true author of Shakespeare's works. Sigmud Freud, completely convinced by Looney, believed Oxford was Shakespeare.

Another candidate is William Stanley who was keenly interested in the theatre and was patron of his own company of actors. Several poems, written in the 1580s and exhibiting signs of an immature Shakespearean style cannot well have been written by Shakespeare himself. One of these is in Derby's handwriting, and three of them are signed “ W.S.”  These initials are thought by some to have been cover up for Derby's identity and to have been later expanded into “ William Shakespeare”.

Roger Manners, the Earl of Rutland is another “ Shakespeare” for the play of hamlet. Between the 1st and 2nd parts of Hamlet, the author learned a few things abut Danish names, Danish geography, and the Danish court at Elsinore. During this period, Rutland was English ambassador to Denmark, and when he had studied at Padua University in 1596, two of his fellow students named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Sppoky, isn't? Maybe Rutland didn't write all the plays, but it sure seems like he wrote one of them. Scholars say who really wrote Shakespeare's plays, was revealed in a book launched on October 19 at the Globe theatre in London. The book claims the conspiracy of secret codes, missing documents and the identity of the true “ Shakespeare”.

Nobody seems to have taken much notice of Shakespeare when he was alive. No one knows if he wrote any of his own material. Nobody questioned him as a writer at the time. No books, no letters, no archives. So there is zero proof that Shakespeare wrote his own material. “When you come to linking Shakespeare with his plays, there is virtually a vacuum,” Rubinstein said. “ There's nothing, not even an eyewitness account that says I saw William Shakespeare with ye manuscript of Hamlet under his arm. It could be that every scrapt of paper by or about him was used to wrap fish or something like that. But the other things is that many facts of his life simply don't fit the evolution of his plays

Why can't Shakespeare be a woman? A woman from New England named Delia Bacon who taught Shakespeare in school went to England in 1853 to try to dig up to prove that there was no body in the grave, just a bag of rocks. As a schoolteacher herself, she felt that school was important and that it was impossible that the greatest writer in the history of English language almost never went to school.

In addition, the tombstone of Shakespeare specifically states that under no circumstances should this grave be dug up. His tombstone reads: “ Good friend for Jesus sake forebeare, To dig the dust enclosed heare. Blese be ye man that spares the stones, And curst be he that moves my bones.” Few documents or verifiable   sources of Shakespeare's life exist, much fewer than would be expected of such a prominent figure. Originals of none of his manuscripts have survived. Not one document exists giving evidence of any one ever seeing him. Not even his family ever referred to him as a famous playwright. Finally, there was a good reason for the real author of the works of Shakespeare to keep his identity a secret.

Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, William Stanley, Roger Manners, the Earl of Rutland, and Elizabth Vere are many of the possible William Shakespeare. We will never know who really wrote all the plays. It could be one person or it can be all the seven of the people that I have mentioned. Even though we don't know who wrote them we should enjoy them.