The Shakespeare Conundrum

The controversy over the authorship of Shakespeare is two centuries old, and the doubters were numerous: Mark Twain, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens, Sigmond Freud, Charlie Chaplin, even Orson Welles questioned the veracity of Shakespeare as author. For starters, the man had no known education. He was raised by illiterate parents in a rural farm village, where the local school only had three grades. But even that much schooling is in doubt, because there is no evidence he was ever registered there (or anywhere) as a student. He signed his wedding certificate with an ‘x’. His will included no books-not even a bible-and his gravestone epitaph is superstitious and illiterate.

So, who was the true author? Once again, the evidence is extensive and conclusive and points in a single direction, to a man forced to live in exile sending plays from Italy to the Globe, where Shakespeare, whose three roles in the company (actor, producer and ‘author’) assured that he would be first to receive anything, then he simply stamped his name on them. Four centuries of grave injustice cannot easily be overcome. But this is a start…