The Authorship Debate

Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare. I'm sick of him and his plays. I wake up in the morning, reciting my Macbeth lines and I've had enough. So tomorrow, I'm performing my Macbeth play, and I would be done with this blog. *PHEW* Eventhough we still have that heavy, heavy booklet that is so difficult to finish in time (speaking from my experience with the TKAM booklet), it still removes some of the Shakespeare that is taking over my brain. But now, I have to write the best blog post I have written in the last 6 weeks, because this is the last chance I get (I'm not promising anything).

So, as you might have already noticed, I couldn't care less if Shakespeare's work was his original work, or someone else has written them. All I know, that the story lines are great, and the language is horrible. However, there are enough conspiracy theories regarding Shakespeare's work.

There are three different ideas as to what's happening/happened:

1. The William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon and the William Shakespeare working in London were two separate people and that they were falsely connected by historians. If this is really what happened, then it's really disappointing -.-
2. Someone called William Shakespeare did work at 'The Globe Theatre', but did not write the plays. Shakespeare was putting his name to plays given to him by someone else.
3. William Shakespeare was a pen name for another writer or a group of writers

There are many reasons as to why people think that it's not Shakespeare who wrote these famous plays:

• He did not have university education to write with such knowledge and skill about the classics, how can a non-educated person write such "touching" plays - although he might have been introduced to it when he was in school in Stratford-upon-Avon
• There is no record of him going to Stratford-upon-Avon Grammar school, (only available school in that area at that time) so he couldn't have learnt about the classics when he was at school  - however, school records were not kept at that time.
• When Shakespeare died, none of his contemporary writers made tribute to him, that's proof that he's not the one who wrote these plays - although references were made during his lifetime

The other possible authors:

Christopher Marlowe

• Christopher Marlowe: He was born the same year as Shakespeare, but died around the same time when Shakespeare started writing his plays. Christopher was the world's best playwright, until Shakespeare came along. So theory is, Christopher didn't really die, and started writing under a different name. Apparently, there is evidence that Christopher was working as a government spy, so maybe his death (stabbed in a tavern) had been choreographed.

• Edward de Vere: Many of Shakespeare's plots were very similar to Edward's real life experiences and encounters. He was educated enough to write these plays, however, their political standing at that time might have ruined his social standing, so maybe he needed to write under pseudonym (A fake name used by writers to hide their real identity)

Edward de Vere

• Sir Francis Bacon: This is a really weak theory that barely has any evidence. The theory is, he was the only man intelligent enough to write these plays, however there is no reason why he would write under a pseudonym.

Doesn't that ruin everything you've read/found out/seen about Shakespeare? It's like the 6 weeks of writing about him has been all lies. I feel like I don't know Shakespeare anymore. Especially after reading the theory about Christopher Marlowe. I mean, he could be a TOTALLY different person, but we can't know. This is not something I could Google and find 1 answer straight away, and now it's going to keep bugging me, and I can never know the answer. This just messed up everything in my head, and it's NOT COOL. It's not that I think it's not fair, all the credit is going to Shakespeare when someone else might have written these plays, or that historians couldn't do their jobs and find out who the author really is.

Sir Francis Bacon

It's just that I'm a very curious person and I might not forget about this for another 2 weeks.

So, if you don't feel the same way as I do right now, maybe you could watch this video.

So, to end this post, I might say that this is definitely not the best blog post I have written. I'm sorry if I bored you with my ranting, but good bye for now! No more new posts every Saturday from me :)