W Shakespeare did he write his own plays and are they actually any good?

is the bard all that good?
and did he actually write those plays?
surely Hamlet is too much of a classic for a simple poor boy?

There's a section on this in The Friendly Shakespeare. In it, Epstein comes down on the side of "most likely he did." The claims for the other contenders really aren't any stronger than Shakespeare's own: Shakespeare's family wasn't rich, but it wasn't all that poor either, and he did have some education. And apparently, the school Shakespeare would have attended in Stratford was pretty good by whatever yardstick she was applying.

As for the quality of the plays themselves, some are better than others. I prefer King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing over Hamlet; and I remember not liking Romeo and Juliet all that much at all when I read it in eighth grade. But to each their own.

i love hamlet
not sure why

#1 - read Jasper Fforde for a variety of scenarios in which Shakespear did or did not write all the plays currently attributed to him.

A lot of people will tell you Shakespeare was a genius; a few will tell you he's overrated. You have to decide for yourself.
If you possibly can, go and see some good, professional performances of his plays: the words were written to be spoken, not read on the page.

>5 thorold:
True. These are, after all, scripts. You'd probably have a greater appreciation for Rear Window if you saw the movie than if you read the screenplay.

I have heard that it was all written by a different William Shakespeare from Essex.

> 6

And an even greater appreciation if you read the Cornell Woolrich story on which the film was based!

>6 AnnaClaire:,8
To appreciate it fully, you have to get your neighbours on the other side of the courtyard to rent the video and watch it through binoculars from your own apartment.
(I lived in an apartment with a view like that for 20 years, but didn't break my leg until about a year after moving out. Needless to say, Ms Kelly never turned up...)

I think there are two concurrent threads on this subject.

I have noticed in the advanced tickets sales section in Fandango for a local theater that the Globe Theater is sending out productions of some of his plays to movie theaters. I have been happy with the Metropolitan Opera's high definition broadcasts, the National Theatre's presentations, and a one off, so far, musical (Memphis) in my near(enough)by theaters. I will take in the Shakespeare on offer -- I am very much happier with performances than with reading him.

Robert

if I wrote The Tempest, Hamlet, etc., I seriously doubt that I'd let Willy take credit. I have not heard that anyone else has stepped forward to take credit. As for the query - is he all that good? -my vote is yes. His use of the English language is brilliant, although some plays are best enjoyed through out-take (one word?) quotations.

Yes, Shakespeare is that good.

And Yes, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare; nobody else had the time. (It's not something you could do as a part-time hobby....)

I am willing to believe that Shakespeare really wrote his own plays.

He may be more famous than he deserves; simply because once you're at the top, that's an accusation that will be made. Some of his work is quite good. If it wasn't, why would they keep making movies like Kiss Me Kate, 10 Things I Hate About You, or She's the Man?

An interesting historical oddity is that, while there is a sort of pop-cultural idea of what Shakespeare looked like, there is a decent chance it's inaccurate. There aren't any certainly identifiable likenesses of him dated to his own lifetime.

"After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations." H. L. Mencken

There is little doubt that Ol' Will wrote all of his plays. Bryson, in Shakespeare: The World as Stage, provides a better explanation than i could.

I believe he wrote his own plays, but I also believe many of his storylines were highly derivative from other stories, tales, legends, etc. The wonder of what he wrote is in the language, not the originality.

Well written, Cecrow. This controversy has been going on for almost as many years as WS's first folio. I once saw a great cartoon in The New Yorker (I think). It showed a mother, pushing a small boy holding a manuscript. She's saying, "Now William, give Francis back his plays and say you're sorry." (Francis Bacon was purported to be the author of WS's work too.)
Cheers,
Collette.

It is true that the language of Shakespeare is exquisite, but to suggest that it is the only source of 'wonder' in his works is to shortchange him. If 'writing' were the word used, I could see it, because writing would encompass another thing of which he was the master, characterization. Well expressed as the story is, it is Hamlet's character that makes that play, etc.

Robert

>18 Mr.Durick:, right, that's a better word. Examining Shakespeare's exacting use of rhyme and measure goes a long way to appreciating him too.

I read romeo and Juliet and loved it after used of course i got used to their way of speaking

they speak weird, did we used to talk like this?

Yes. Yes.

no seriously? how embarrsing is that?
jesus what a weird world we are

anway reading all these comments i'm still sure someone else wrote these plays. they are too good for shakespeare

who else could of wroten it?

You caught me. I admit it, I wrote Shakespeare.

(Except of course for Titus Andronicus - that shit's all Thomas Middleton's fault, the hack....)

Thats pretty funny

Yes, it is!

That's what I thought

20, 21> For what it's worth, no, people did not talk in iambic pentameter or use many of the phrases that are in the plays. The iambic pentameter that most of the important people use (most of the time: see King Lear for an important exception) was a poetic device. Also, Shakespeare seems to have invented many words to fit the meter and rhyme.

But other than that, most of the language is very similar to how we speak, just with different pronunciations and some different definitions - and then some obsolete words. Language evolves in time as people create new slang or words go out of fashion. Shakespeare was writing about 500 years ago, so that's a long time for language to evolve - but language has evolved even since 50 years ago - just not as noticeably.

Thats true I haven't thought of that.

I have an intermittently tin ear (I don't know how that can be without a philosopher's stone) so I shouldn't judge for myself. I have been told that English tends to pattern naturally in iambs; it probably did also around 1600.

Robert

Not to the extent that Shakespeare wrote, however, since there's evidence that many words that are now common were coined just to fit the meter.

Also, there's plenty of scenes where he doesn't use the iambic pentameter structure at all. You can usually tell which characters are meant to be more noble or aristocratic, because they use the iambic pentameter - it's why it's so significant in King Lear when Lear switches to regular speech patterns.

Thats what I noticed too.

I have evidence!
queen elizabeth fancied old Will and wrote a few plays for him before her death so he would be enternally grateful and maybe return her love.
the earl of southampton might have but he was abit of a party animal and writing a decent play with a hangover might have been difficult.
Then there was the earl of rutland who had been to denmark just before hamlet was performed. There was evidence he had never ever written a play but in them days it probably wasn't too mascaline.
sir francis bacon is a popular contender for who really wrote Will's plays and he could of remember and then there was chris marlowe who may have also written them plays.
now you may ask why, well, maybe they felt sorry for Will, or thier own social standing prevented them. and maybe if they had to hide because they had been heavily involved with hot politics and would have to hide away Will would have helped front the plays instead.
now what do you think about that?

There was evidence he had never ever written a play but in them days it probably wasn't too mascaline.

Not so. At the time, playwrights were primarily male. You had women like Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre 70 to 100 years later who wrote popular plays, but it wasn't considered very seemly. I don't think I've heard of any major women playwrights from the Elizabethan or Jamesian periods.

 
now what do you think about that?

I think that people have been trying to claim alternate authorship of Shakespeare's works for ages, but that it has been 400 years since they were written. They weren't even kept written down until the quartos and folios were produced, except by various actors for their own use as notes and so on. I'd be very surprised if anyone were able to prove the authorship was other than Shakespeare without using a time machine. I also don't really understand the obsession with trying to prove such a thing, since I don't think it makes much difference in the end.

I will prove it. I will destoy shakspeares reutation, even if it takes me my whole life. I've had to sudy 'his' works my whole time in school and it wasn't fun, not at all. It's better to see it, like shakespeare supposedly wanted.
I think it does make a difference. somehow it matters who wrote them, who ever wrote them should get the credit and a round of applause. I like romeo and juliet and I love Hamlet. but I must know the truth.

#37 - ROFL!!!

what clamairy does that mean? I wonder...

a grammar school boy would imply he had a classical education with a knowledge of latin since the grammar in grammar school is always latin. and was seen as destined for civil service or its equivalent. so he had the education. and what little documentation mostly legal we see of him shows him to be thought both worldly and wise by his peers.

so yes I have no problem thinking of him as a playwright.

he can't of been a playwright. Look at him, you can dress the poor boy in fancy clothes but he will still remain the poor boy in fancy clothes that don't suit him. he didn't write them.
Look at your latin you can beat the latin out of this grammer school boy if you belt him round the head hard enough and give him brain damage so he can't remember anything at all.

It means that I find your notion that you can possibly prove what others have not VERY amusing.

37> That's just silly. Not liking an author's works is no reason to say that the author didn't write them.

For one, even if the works weren't written by the specific person we know as William Shakespeare, their impact on our culture is strong enough, and the history of them as a set known to be written by the man is long enough, that they will inevitably continue to be taught in schools as required reading, and they will continue to be performed. In fact, if definitive proof were found to show that Shakespeare is not the author, then I imagine that the popularity of the plays would be even greater, as the publicity would draw everyone's attention to them.

Secondly, just because you don't like a particular work doesn't mean the authorship is illegitimate. I don't care for much of what Dickens wrote, but I have no right to claim that he isn't the proper author. Or, an analogy that matches your claim that "poor boys in fancy clothes" can't write: Eliza Haywood was a woman who wrote hundreds of popular essays, novels, poems, &c., but really, she didn't do any of it, because she was a woman, and there's no way a woman's writing could be that good or that popular at the time she wrote. Women didn't have the same kind of education as men, after all, and everyone knows Haywood was friends with men in literary circles, so clearly they were the actual authors of her work, and used her name only for the scandal that it created. Besides all that, Haywood was too busy being a mother and whore to actually write, much less publish her own magazine. To which I say: poppycock.

Shakespeare wasn't as poor as you make him out to be, by the standards of the day, and Haywood was part of a long line of successful women writers (perhaps she benefited from those that came before). And in either case, having little money or being a woman is no reason why someone can't become successful with the pen.

 

At any rate, if I've learned one thing from working in a contemporary art museum (or even in the process of earning an English (lit.) BA), it's that you can appreciate art or literature as being worthwhile, significant, and/or important, even if you don't personally enjoy it.

43: Not to mention the Shakespeare-did-not-write-Shakespeare argument stemmed from A) the backlash of his popularity in the 19th century, B) class snobbery, and C) the anti-Statfordians were headed by Delia Bacon, a woman primarily looking for attention and who had a fixation on Calvinist martyrdom. No one who's looked at the history of the argument takes it seriously.

I've read a number of books from different sides of the argument, and though some of them are compelling (Earl of Oxford being Shakespeare, Elizabeth's son and lover! Drama!), none of them have convinced me that anyone else wrote Shakespeare. I'm not a staunch Stratfordian, but I wouldn't say anyone's really pulled me any other way.

I think that when I retire, I think I'll take up crackpottery as a hobby. (...Everybody needs a hobby, after all.)

Following a friend's suggestion, I think I'm going to become a zealous advocate of the idea that Edward de Vere wrote the Declaration of Independence. Which makes every bit as much sense as the 'Who Wrote Shakespeare?' lunacy.

The major-league candidates for 'Secret Shakespeare' are Bacon, Oxford, and Marlowe. None of them had the time for such an undertaking. So you're left with the minor-league candidates, none of whom showed the talent.

Being a Shakespeare Conspiracy Nut is evidence of a very weak ability to reason, an inability to follow the evidence.

Ah, Bob. What a wonderful idea - I've been looking for a good hobby.

Hmmm...could we make a case for Snooki writing her own book? Nah...too far fetched.

I'll think about it some more.

Just for the sake of argument, suppose the Wm. S. of the documents did not personally scribe the plays bearing that name: rather, it was some unknown Wm. S., who has left no other hint of his existence. Would the plays then not be as significant and influential, and would they not be by Wm. S.? Of course they would. Whether the Wm. S. whose name is on the plays is the same Wm. S. who appears in the documents is irrelevant; in the context of literature & drama "Wm. S." means 'the author of the plays bearing that name', regardless of whether it's a pseudonym.

The music by Enya isn't solely the creation of Eithne Ní Bhraonáin, as she herself has said. At least two others are closely involved. Enya is an identity but not a single person; I suppose it's more like a brand than anything else but that probably has too much of a commercial implication. Similarly, Wm. S. is the name by which we call whoever it was who wrote the plays. Very likely it was the same Wm. S. as in the historical record, but it doesn't really matter (except probably to the town of Stratford upon Avon).

Yeah, I hear that Classics Departments have a standing joke that the Illiad wasn't written by Homer; no, it was written by another poet named Homer.....

Edited to add: Would the plays then not be as significant and influential, and would they not be by Wm. S.?

"...that which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet..."

It was his son, Homer Jr. The kids called him "HoJu".

hey I do like Hamlet. I'm just not sold on the idea of shakspeare writing it.

In the OP you wrote, is the bard all that good?
and did he actually write those plays?
surely Hamlet is too much of a classic for a simple poor boy?

"The bard" is the playwright, regardless of his other identities. It is because the plays are really good that he is known as "the bard", not because of his name. So because "the bard" wrote those plays, and the plays are really good, then, yes, the bard is "that good." Was Wm. Shakespeare that same bard? That is the most parsimonious conclusion to be drawn from the evidence.

Whether something becomes a classic is a judgment that is made by subsequent generations. It is a recognition that is bestowed at least as much as it is earned. And the suggestion that a certain social or economic class membership is a prerequisite to writing Hamlet makes the same assumptions that underlie the historical distinctions between nobles and commoners. One could argue about the answer to your question but it's not a very good question to begin with.

>50 drbubbles:,52
Aha, got it!

"Shakespeare" died in 1616. If you take the word "Bard" and add sixteen to the last letter, you get "Bart", a.k.a. Homer Jr. And we all know that Homer eats a lot of Bacon...

Q.E.D!

Robert

To amplify my #46...

OK, I've probably been giving this more thought than it deserves, but one thing the "Secret Shakespeare" idiots ignore is how time-consuming both life AND art are.

That is, in order to write a play, you need to clear your desk of whatever else you're working on. And you can't really do that if you are Lord High Chancellor of the Kingdom. Or even a run-of-the-mill courtier. Playwriting is work, it takes time.

Shakespeare is thought to have produced about 40 plays (AND some serious poetry) in about 20 years of activity. Roughly, two plays a year.

Marlowe - often busy with some other business, but he turned out about 6 plays in about 6 years: 1/yr.
Fletcher - 16 sole-author plays, and another 16? collaborations in 20? years or so. Say, 1.3 - 1.5/yr.
Jonson - 20 plays and 36 masques in 40 years or so. Figure 2masques = 1 play?, that's roughly 1/yr.
Kyd wrote 6? plays in 10? years (but that includes some jail time). Roughly 1/yr.
Middleton wrote 30-some plays, 14 masques and some poetry in 25 years or so. Say, 1.5/yr.
I'm not going to run through the whole list of Elizabethan dramatists, but it looks like 1-2/yr is all that a full-time playwright can do.

So, looking at your Elizabethan playwrights, "a play a year" is a solid career for a full time playwright; and two plays a year seems to be about the limit for a full time playwright, somebody who has found a racket that will put food on his table, and who is willing to make it a full-time career. And note that Shakespeare's output is toward the high end of the range.

Done as an idle hobby, then: how fast would somebody churn these plays out?

The loonies propose that somebody could write work of Shakespeare's caliber at twice Ben Jonson's pace. AND in secret. AND in their spare time. AND while they maintained a full-time cover career.

I get the sense that most of the "Goethe wrote Shakespeare" loonies have never actually worked a day in their lives. Because "work" is not just time-consuming, it's exhausting. (That, after all, is why it's called "work".)

Bacon was Lord Fucking Chancellor of England, and wrote what, 50 books on every topic under the sun?
And the loonies propose that - in his ample spare time - he was supposed to be secretly out-writing a professional full-time hack like Ben Jonson? Sorry, that's just physically impossible.

Try it. Try running a lord's estate, or sit in Parliament, or run an entire kingdom, and then come home and churn out a huge corpus of some deathless literature. Where would somebody find the time to out-produce a professional writer when one is writing solely as a hobby? In Bacon's case, it would be like being White House Chief of Staff AND simultaneously (secretly) writing the Steven King corpus. Crazy talk.

One or two plays, maybe even the sonnet sequence, yeah, that's entirely possible. How or why someone would do that is not clear, but that's physically and intellectually possible. Nobody seems to be much claiming that, though.

But given the pace of Shakespeare's output - at the high end for a full-time Elizabethan playwright - it would actually make more sense for "William Shakespeare" to have been a house name for the Globe Theatre, and the plays could conceivably been written by a staff committee of whoever had time to contribute to one: but that idea doesn't explain the flashes of genius. (cf. the output of the Stratemeyer Syndicate.) And nobody seems to be proposing that.

Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. Nobody else had the time, or the talent.

I believe you, Bob. ~~pats on the arm~~

okay, I'm better now....

Me, too. But then, I did already. (pre-rant)

;-)

Well, there's also the bit of business that runs:

1) The Shakespeare Canon is a work of genius.
2) Very little is known of WS's life.
3) BECAUSE I don't know anything about WS, I therefore conclude that he COULDN'T have written the Canon.
4) And therefore propose {some impossible Secret Author}.

#3 is just shockingly poor reasoning.

>46 AsYouKnow_Bob: - The field already exists Bob - Psychoceramics - the study of crackpots

>55 AsYouKnow_Bob: - Good analysis. I've often wondered about the time/output issue and just what one could expect with respect to full time vs. part time.

>58 MerryMary:

Oh, of course. There's never been a good reason to doubt it was Shakespeare, but Bob's rant is nice because it takes a different approach than usual and makes use of actual data.

It reminds me of a documentary (NOVA, maybe?) about Loch Ness that pointed out the density of universally accepted resident critters is too low to sustain a monster of any size. None of the 'evidence' for Nessie has ever been more than confused or wishful thinking, but that documentary affected me like the final resounding blow on the last nail in the lid.

>59 AsYouKnow_Bob:

Underpants --> ? --> Profit!!

#60 Yep. It's used as a tag on LT:
http://www.librarything.com/tag/psychoceramics

Good analysis.
Thanks!

You get the sense that the "Chaucer wrote Shakespeare " crowd have never themselves tried to create a work of art: they think the plays can be moved around like poker chips.

Edited to add: Here's another data point:
Neil Simon - 33 plays and about 34 credited screenplays in a working career of about 50 years.
Say, 1.3 - 1.4/year.

(Now I'm talking myself into the idea that Shakespeare was TOO prolific, and could have been a House Syndicate pen name.... ) But sure as hell, nobody writes that much as their Secret Hobby.

Hah! The related tags are hilarious.

#61: ...density of universally accepted resident critters is too low...

Hey! Low????? That's because of the constant predation!!!!11!!

(What's "nom" in Scottish English—nochm? naem? nichm?)

huh Lionel Fanthorpe could have written them all in a year in his spare time.

>#55: "Bacon was Lord Fucking Chancellor of England, and wrote what, 50 books on every topic under the sun?"

Two flaws in this argument:
1. Somebody else could have written Bacon's works (i suspect Shakespeare)
2. He could have been a lazy-arse Lord Chancellor. Computer solitaire wasn't invented yet, writing deathless literature may have been a way to fill in the time between 9 & 5.

I find it hard to understand how ANYONE could have been a prolific writer in the days of quill pens. Once I decided to keep an entire journal using just a dip pen, whatever it's called pre-fountain, and it was fun, but time consuming! We are so spoiled nowadays.

Therefore I nominate Bill Gates as the writer of Shakespeare. Or maybe Angela Lansbury (Shakespeare, She Wrote)

Given all of these factors (rate of playwriting, speed of writing with quills, the variety of suggested authors) it's pretty clear that no one person could have written all of Shakespeare's plays. The only logical alternative is that it was a playwriting committee comprising Bacon, Oxford, Marlowe, Jonson, Haywood, Dickens, Goethe, Stephen King, Nessie, Gates, Lansbury, and all the other William Shakespeares who weren't the William Shakespeare.

It was this guy

Huh:

>63 AsYouKnow_Bob: - more likely a skewed distribution since there is an actual lower physical bound of 0. Using all of the numbers you've offered the small sample would suggest a median of 1.3 with 2 in the 90th percentile.

re #73:
Yeah, that's roughly what I made it by eyeball: WS is at the high end of the distribution, but not unbelievably high. (The idea of "WS" being a house name is not really necessary to explain his productivity.)

My larger point, though, is that the "Secret Shakespeare" folks ignore the fact that life is time-consuming: you can't realistically ADD a secret career to the life of person who was known not to be an idler. "Playwright" is in itself a full-time job.

>74 AsYouKnow_Bob: No arguement - the only reason for replying was your comment about maybe talking yourself into the idea that he was too prolific. I was just pointing out that the numbers look like a well behaved skewed distribution and so there's really nothing odd about them at all. As I said before, it is nice to have some sense of output/year and what that would mean with respect to writing plays.

Please can we have smily/frowny faces to indicate who is serious here and who isn't? I can usually tell but this thread lost me round about the OP. :-( (seriously).

aren't we apes anyway?

No.

I thought we were

It depends upon the taxonomic approach employed, keeping in mind that "ape" has never been a formal taxon (rather a vernacular taxon that has at times been more or less isomorphic with various formal taxa).

Under traditional phenetic schemes, we aren't apes but rather hominids, who together with the "real" apes comprised the hominoids ("'real' ape" here meaning "non-hominid hominoid" EtA sometimes comprising a single hominid-level taxon, in which case "ape" mapped onto a "real" taxon; other times, multiple hominid-level taxa /EtA). However, one might (and this has been done for rhetorical and pedagogical purposes) refer to all hominoids as apes (think The Naked Ape).

Cladistically, there is no formal taxon that includes everything we think of as an 'ape' while at the same time excluding humans and our bipedal ancestors. So, cladistically, either apes include us along with all the "real" apes, or else there is no such thing as an ape at all.

Wikipedia has a good overview of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape

In vernacular terms we probably aren't apes, but systematically we're 'apes' just as much as 'real apes' are.

In slightly simpler terms we're descended from a creature who also had other descendants some of which are currently called apes. (nb we're not descended from the creatures currently called apes).

Whether any of these creatures would be able to write shakespear's plays no matter how many of them were provided with manually operating ink and paper hyroglyphic replicators remains to be seen.

In slightly simpler terms we're descended from a creature who also had other descendants some of which are currently called apes.

Of course, that description is broad enough to refer to the ancestral organism of all life on earth....

alien bacteria.

>83 MrAndrew:
Or, for the haughtier and more exclusive persons here: a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule

...of extraterrestrial origin.

and indiscriminate habits.

one of Shakespeare's better plays, i agree.

On 55:

A very good anti-baconian argument in your paragraphs 10-11, a kBob.

I think one of my h.s. teachers, a Miss Hogan* had an equally strong (and

shorter) one: WHOEVEr write the W S Corpus was, among other things,

a great humorist, while Sir F B had "NOt a spark of humor!"

*Never did (and this was exceptional among h.s. teachers) know her 1st name,

My high school English teacher referred to Mr. Shakespeare as simply "Bill". Since he was the only person we ever heard her refer to by a first name we assumed she was a personal friend. I should have asked her.

>90 TLCrawford:
Must have tricky, keeping track of Ms Capulet and Mr Montague, Jr...

If she was doing it right it wouldn't have been too bad: Mrs. and Miss Capulet, Mr. Montague, Master Romeo &c. Or, perhaps, Sig.ra and Sig.na Capulet, Sig. Montague, Sig.no Romeo, &c.

>92 drbubbles:
Come to think of it, R&J is one of the few plays where most of the characters have last names. Bad example...

Is it Mr Puck or Master Puck?

I suggest anyone interested in this topic reads the brilliantly entertaining 'Contested Will; who wrote Shakespeare' by the american academic James Shapiro. He pretty well nails all the conspiracy theories about other authors and the book is a hilarious history of how all these stories came about and the loony logic of all of them. The basic idea that Shakespeare didn't write them stemmed from a lit crit fashion in Victorian times that you couldn't write about things you hadn't experienced and as Shakespeare came from a rural middle class background he didn't have the necessary knowledge to write the plays. Believe me this book is very funny and completely absorbing

C and C

>95 readerzone: Thanks for the recommendation - I just finished the book - good read.

When I saw the previews for this movie I thought of this thread and wondered if the op had advance knowledge of this movie?

Anonymous (I) (2011)
A political thriller advancing the theory that it was in fact Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford who penned Shakespeare's plays; set against the backdrop of the succession of Queen Elizabeth I, and the Essex Rebellion against her.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1521197/

The "theory" that came nearest to convincing me that William Shakespeare may not have been the author of these works was the one that pointed the finger at the Countess of Pembroke. Having said that, I see no reason to believe that the man himself did not create his plays. His "lowly" background is not a determining factor in his intellectual ability, and as an ex-Grammar School boy myself I'd find it simply insulting to embrace that theory. While we don't know a lot about the man himself, we do know quite a lot about his possible sources of both inspiration and knowledge, so we know where he obtained the "material". The idea that there would not have been time for one man to write these plays is just silly.

I thought I caught a whiff of nonsensical play, and now here I am. My, I do have the nose of a bloodhound.

Has this entire thread been some promotional stunt for the movie "Anonymous"? If so, well played!

From the research I did for an English paper it appears that William Shakespeare rewrote many older works and changed them a bit to make them his own. He also periodically worked with other people to make his plays, usually people from his own theatre. He was not only a playwright but an actor and used the stories he knew well to create something new.

My paper was about the The Wooden O and not specifically Shakespeare, but it seems clear that he was not a "poor boy" but a somewhat educated man who was part owner and stockholder of a business that was successful.

I do not understand why people keep debating this issue but then there are those who swore for years that Elvis was alive. Some people like controvery, even if it is about someone who lived 500 years ago.

Do I like Shakespeare plays? I like to watch them more than I like to read them. The langauge is more engaging to hear than to try to read.

Elvis "was" alive?

Wrong tense, my dear sir.

Ouch. By the way, I am a female. Have a nice day!

I assumed that you were knighted.

Beknighted. What's all this stuff about Elvis being dead?

Beknighted. What's all this stuff about Elvis being dead?

I like the idea of a committee at the Globe writing Shakespeare's plays but I don't believe it. I did entertain the thought that Christopher Marlowe wrote them at one time but does it really matter? Noone is going to pay him any royalties and it is great to have a name to go with the works. I just hope what I read recently about the theatre in Stratford doesn't stop tourists. We need all the friends we can get!

I think Shakespeare probably worked with one or two people for some of his works but not necessarily the same people throughout his career. It has been a couple years since I did my research paper and I do not remember much of the details. I actually posted to this discussion board because of a library course I am taking. I was hoping to get a couple people to respond to my opinion. Thank you for your response!

Shakespeare did collaborate with other working playwrights. Recent scholarship generally accepts these plays as by multiple authors:

From the First Folio:
- 1 Henry VI - WS, Thomas Nashe & another --Marlowe?
- 2 Henry VI - WS and another -- Marlowe?
- 3 Henry VI - WS and another -- Marlowe?
- Titus Andronicus - WS and George Peele; and the "Fly scene" (not in the Quarto, first appears in the Folio) probably a late addition by Thomas Middleton
- Timon of Athens - WS and Thomas Middleton
- Henry VIII - WS and John Fletcher
- Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well & Macbeth -- WS of course but after his death these were revised for revival by Thomas Middleton
The other 27 Folio plays are just plain old WS.

Non-Folio collaborations
- Pericles - WS and George Wilkins
- Two Noble Kinsmen - WS and john Fletcher
- Edward III - WS and another -- Marlowe?
- Sir Thomas More - original play by Anthony Munday, additions by several writers including Shakespeare
- Arden of Faversham - WS (Act III) and another
- The Spanish Tragedy - original play by Thomas Kyd, with some later additions by WS and Thomas Heywood
- Cardenio - WS and and john Fletcher -- the original play is lost but traces appear to survive beneath a heavy adaptation by Lewis Theobald entitled Double Falsehood.

For a good overview of the authorship question see
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/