The Shakespeare Authorship Question: Who Held the Pen?

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 09:00:00 +0000

A grammar-school boy from a Warwickshire market town, son of a glover who signed his accounts with a mark because he could not write, leaves almost no personal trace on the historical record — no letters, no manuscripts in his own hand, no library named in his will — and yet is credited with the largest working vocabulary in English literature, an intimate command of law, seamanship, falconry, court manners, Italian geography and classical rhetoric, and a body of plays that has out-survived empires. Set the two facts side by side and a reasonable person feels a genuine itch. How did that man write those plays? The question has occupied clever, serious people for a century and a half, and it deserves to be met with more than a sneer. So let me do the harder and fairer thing first: build the doubters’ case at its strongest, in good faith, before I show you where it breaks.

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The Shakespeare Authorship Question: Who Held the Pen?