why is there disagreement about who wrote shakespeare's plays?

So William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, gentleman, was the actor who performed in the plays in the company for which William Shakespeare wrote plays. Rival Actors Sparked Fatal 'Shakespeare Riots', The Real Shakespeare? If there was a conspiracy to dupe the public, Hodge’s tale, based on many other stories, works well. Shakespeare wrote 37 plays (though some experts think it may have been more). The fact is though that Shakespeare didn't need to travel to these places to write about them. Only an aristocrat could have traveled to all these places. They almost convince you that Marlowe actually did it. Read Mark Twain's pamphlet debunking the Bard. This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order. It is a part of delicious staging that works well. Fake death. There is even a Shakespearean Authorship Trust, which you can donate money to in order to help fund research related to discovering the true author(s) of Shakespeare’s plays. The Shakespeare authorship question is a theory (which was first proposed during the Victorian era) that William Shakespeare did not write the plays and poems which were accredited to him. The horse-holding legend ought to be strangled; it too formidably increases the historian's difficulty in accounting for the young Shakespeare's erudition- an erudition which he was acquiring, hunk by hunk and chunk by chunk every day in those strenuous times, and emptying each day's catch into next day's imperishable drama. It runs through May 26. Furthermore, most of the Italian story tellers enjoyed massive popularity in England at that time including Ariosto. His invented “stabbing” gave counselors loyal to the Queen a chance to bury a man said to be Marlowe, faking his death (oh, how many film noir movies used that one?) You remember that photo – Amelia Earhart was standing next to him. The anti-Stratfordians disagree on who really wrote Shakespeare, but they all agree that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare based on three threads of evidence: that he had a lower middle-class, provincial upbringing; that he never went to university; and that he himself was not of noble peerage. This article referred to the Marlowe Society as "hierophants" who believe that Christopher Marlowe wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Nobody could have written 37 plays? This led to a lot of their stories being translated into French as well as English. There are so many “writers” and conspiracies that an entire society was established, the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, to champion their authenticity. Although accessible, stylish play scripts could offer handy entry points for Shakespeare newbies, one almost wonders why O.S.F. Historians Fact-Check 'Mank': Who Really Wrote 'Citizen Kane?' The playwright of that body of work couldn’t have been Pistol and Richard II, Snug the Joiner and Lady Macbeth. If the Kennedy assassination doesn’t interest you, and you’ve got a few extra years on your hands, you might want to look into the debate over who wrote William Shakespeare’s plays. Bettmann/Corbis There is a legend that he got his bread and butter by holding horses in front of the London theatres, mornings and afternoons. Excerpted from Is Shakespeare Dead? Yes, although there was no one in Stratford able to teach him these things, and no library in the little village to dig them out of. He also teaches writing at New Jersey City University. Mr. Chadwick can be reached at bchadwick@njcu.edu. Sir John Gilbert's 1849 painting: The Plays of Shakespeare, containing scenes and characters from several of William Shakespeare's plays. Rhys Ifans as Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford in 'Anonymous.' He left a will distributing his precious possessions, including, famously, his second-best bed. Even though they work on a small stage and with a sparse set, they put you in the middle of London at the start of the sixteenth century. The \"groundlings\" paid less to stand in front of the stage for the show. "It's nothing that gives you the kind of certainty that can never be called into question," Greenblatt says. They are merely a couple of chunks of plaster of paris. For he became a call-boy; and as early as '93 he became a "vagabond" – the law's ungentle term for an unlisted actor; and in '94 a "regular" and properly and officially listed member of that (in those days) lightly-valued and not much respected profession. Anywhere from the Italian city states to Athens in Greece etc etc. He should not have said it. The highlight of the play is the mirthful Punch and Judy puppet show in which different Shakespeare wannabe puppets take on the Bard in boxing matches (there is even a “round girl” puppet that draws laughter from the audience). There are a number of theories surrounding the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, but most are based on one of the following three ideas: The William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon and the William Shakespeare working in London were two separate people. They had precarious seating as they could be pelted with food from the seats above. These things happen. Plays It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 1590 and 1612. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the introduction to Bacon's book, and Mark T… He holds his PhD from Rutgers and was a former editor for the New York Daily News. Thenceforward he was a busy and flourishing business man, and was raking in money with both hands for twenty years. William Shakspere was born in Stratford-upon Avon in 1564 and died in 1616 at the age of 52. William Shakespeare may be widely seen as the greatest writer of all time, but he can't seem to get a break from critics. Maybe he did. The truth is that Marlowe was not killed. That was in 1593, right at the start of William Shakespeare’s career. That's to say, for over 200 years after Shakespeare's death, nobody questioned that Shakespeare, the man from Stratford, Shakespeare the player, was Shakespeare the writer. The small ensemble of actors includes Brady Adair, Tim Dowd, Thomas Grube, Sarah Kiefer and Len Rella. The American humorist never could reconcile what was known about the man from Stratford with the writer who penned "such stuff as dreams are made on.". "They all speak to the activity of a man who is principally a businessman; a man who is delinquent in paying his taxes; who was cited for hoarding grain during a famine," Wright adds. It has been an embarrassment to his historians these many, many years. So, over the years he was paid money and given the scripts, which he put his name on and turned in to theaters. Right soon thereafter he became a stockholder in two theatres, and manager of them. We have only circumstantial evidence. He was in Dallas, Texas in 1963 and was, everybody knows, the second gunmen in the Kennedy assassination, comfortably perched on the grassy knoll with his rifle. No one who did not know the inner workings of the courts and palace could have written all of those political potboiler plays? He were a genius movement starting asking: was Shakespeare real John 1849... Never been answered ’ t have been more ) that there was skullduggery or an alternative account reason to that... That for Shakespeare. `` to believe that Christopher Marlowe wrote the works that bear his name Snug the and! A pamphlet in 1909 poking fun at the Bard, called is Shakespeare Dead buy a seat in the theater... 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