Claim: I don’t give a rat’s ass who Shakespeare really was it’s kind of irrelevant to the content of the plays and their long standing impact on the english language and culture.
As the great Bard, Richard Pryor, once said, “Shakespeare may have been the greatest, but the motherfucker wrote funny.”
Upstart Crow, an excellent BBC sitcom about Shakespeare, has Shakespeare writing the plays attributed to Marlowe because Marlowe is too busy being a spy.
It was Old Man Withers.
The best argument that I have for Shakespearian authorship is that you can see him grow as an author through his works. Titus Andronicus is crap, but by the time you get to some of his later works, they’re amazing works of literature.
And why would you make a pseudonym for yourself only to write subpar plays, and then switch it around so that you only wrote good ones under the alias by the end of your career?
That’s actually very likely to be true. None of the eponymous authors of the Gospels are likely to have put pen to papyrus–they would have worked with an amanuensis to do that. John’s case is actually a little more extreme than that. The gospel goes out of its way to make John look good, even referring to John not by name but as “The disciple whom Jesus loved,” suggesting that the author was a follower of John who probably worked closely on the memoirs but had significant independence.
Francis Bacon was a woman?
ISWYDT 
A reason might be that your ‘pseudonym’ happens to get all the attention.
For example, what if Richard Bachman had been so incredibly popular that no one wanted to read anything by that hack Stephen King?
Not that I think it’s the case but I could see a scenario where a decent jobbing playwright is asked to write some turgid dreck or sees their play so hacked about by the censors that he or she refuses to put their name to it only to find to their horror that the play is staggeringly successful and everyone wants more “Shakespeare”.
The problem is that these anti-Stratfordians are usually doing it to promote an authoritarian, anti-common people philosophy.
I strongly recommend watching this:
Maybe in the Klingon version, Hamlet would think about and then dismiss all the petaQ arguments against vengeance and in favor of personal safety. This is like illogic to a Vulcan – a natural tendency that their culture demands they fight against.
Unless someone finds a period letter in a private archive where the author (not named William Shakespeare) confides to an acquaintance “I have been writing many plays and passing them off as by a local actor named Shakespeare” we will never know for sure. (And even in that case you can bet some scholars will dispute the veracity of the letter.)
At this point in history Shakespeare is Shakespeare– an icon-- less an actual human than an archetype. And that might be why some people don’t want to consider that his work could be by another author or authors: they prefer to believe (what might be) a nice myth/legend.
Debating and studying the issue is an interesting scholarly game, but the plays and sonnets are not really harmed, they remain great art.
Yeah, I had that thought too, but it just seems like an extremely bad fit for any of the Shakespeare author theories.
Sure.
Especially since I never heard of Luther Blissett until just now, but I am intrigued as heck to learn more about it down the google wormhole.
I highly recommend novel “Q”:
You can download it for free from Wu Ming Foundation’s official website:
https://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/downloads.shtml
Oooh I need free ebooks. I am going on a trip at the end of the week!
That’s funny, because he’s here quite regularly, and I’m sure you’ve participated in some of the same conversations
