Who Wrote Shakespeare?

I know it seems a tautology, but people such as Freud, Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, Mark Rylance, Derek Jacobi and most recently the director Roland Emmerich believe that someone else did. The candidates range far and wide but most have settled on Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, the 2nd Earl of Oxford.

And they’re in good company. For hundreds of years, since a man called James Wilmot first decided there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that the man from Stratford was the writer we all know, people have been questioning the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.

Next month, Emmerich’s film Anonymous is released in the UK, which suggests that Shakespeare was nothing but a Warwickshire oaf and the real writer was de Vere.

Well, let me tell you what I think about this. There is not a scrap of evidence to prove that Shakespeare was anyone other than Shakespeare, just a load of conjecture, guessing and fantasy. It’s entirely ridiculous and yet that hasn’t stopped people from searching for the Real Shakespeare.

James Shapiro has written a wonderful book called Contested Will, which is a marvellously rich book explaining who has contested Shakespeare’s authorship. But more than that WHY those people did so, which is in many ways much more interesting.

Recently the lovelies at the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust, released an amazing 60 part audio counter attack on the authorship debate, where academics, actors, directors, Stephen Fry and other experts give their opinion. It’s well worth a look, as is Shapiro’s book by the way.

The main claim against the man from Stratford seems to be that he could not have written the works because he didn’t have a life that reflects what was written in the plays and poems. (whereas apparently De Vere and Bacon didn’t, it is an elitist argument that maintains that only a university educated person could have written these multilayered plays) But this error comes from looking for the man in the work, as if he is always writing autobiography.

The debate will rage on, regardless of a significant lack of evidence to contest the authorship. But people will always need to be heretical, and indeed we should question things, otherwise we would still mistakenly believe that Homer wrote the Illiad and that the gospels were written by the disciples. The diffence? These have been conclusively proven, in the Shakespeare debate, it is merely a need to rubbish the man from Stratford, to reduce his achievements and to attack our greatest writer. BUt despite a few hundred years of attempting to disprove the authorship, no one has.

The film will misinform and miseducate those that watch it, but it won’t change the fact that Shakespeare was not anonymous. He was the son of a Warwickshire glover, who through his own hard work, became the great dramatist the world has ever known.