Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?

Hi! I was just wondering if anyone could tell me about the authorship of Shakespearan literature. IS it true that he did not write it, that some other unknown character did?

I had read somewhere that it was written by Francis Bacon, also
responible for the King James Bible as well.
If I find some links I'll post them.

Here is a couple of links

pages.prodigy.net...

www.geocities.com...

Thank you for your help.

I am sure that'll answer what I'm looking for. By the way, where are you from anyway?

yep i heard it was sir francis bbacon also its said that incorpirated in all of "shakespears" plays are cryptic cyphers that reveal high esoteric knowledge passed from ancient egypt through secret societys

Sorry guys to burst your bubble but William Shakespeare did write all of his plays, he was helped on two they were

Henry VIII
Two noble Kingsmen

The reason I know this there is a lot of supporting evidence form people who have seen and written his plays that he wrote them, and none that supports anyone else writing them other than spurious academic hypotheses. I am an English graduate and have done an indepth study into this.

He didn't publish his work though, he didnt even write the plays as whole, an actor would only be given his role. These were compiled and published by his friends in1622 in the first folio, some years after his death.
If you want any more info or where to read this evidence u2u me or post here. Cheers!

The fact that some works were published under the attribute of William Shakespeare does not identify the man behind the name. There is nothing in his handwriting ever discovered except for six almost illegible signatures. There are no letters, no correspondence, no manuscripts, no paper trail at all to identify the man behind the name, not a single word. Huckleberry Finn was published under the name of Mark Twain but there is nothing to identify him as Samuel Clemens. When contemporaries refer to William Shakespeare, they are referring to the name on the title page and nothing else.

The few facts we know about Shakespeare from Stratford are stretched, pulled, and twisted to make it plausible that he was the author. There is nothing in his biography to connect him with the works. Indeed the opposite is true. Robert Bearman sums up Shakespeare's life as follows in "Shakespeare in the Stratford Records" (1994), published by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust: "Certainly, there is little, if anything, to remind us that we are studying the life of one who in his writings emerges as perhaps the most gifted of all time in describing the human condition. He seems merely to have been a man of the world, buying up property, laying in ample stocks of barley and malt, when others were starving, selling off his surpluses and pursuing debtors in court…."

The sonnets are written by a man who is clearly much older. Conventional chronology dates the sonnets to between 1592 and 1596. At this time, William of Stratford would have been in his late twenties and early thirties (Oxford was 14 years older). Even if we up the date to 1599, William of Stratford was still in his thirties. The sonnets tell us that the poet was in his declining years when writing them. He was "Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity," "With Time's injurious hand crushed and o'er worn", in the "twilight of life". He is lamenting "all those friends" who have died, "my lovers gone". His is "That time of year/When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/Upon those boughs that shake against the cold."

The sonnets that most contradict Will of Stratford's life story are those about shame and disgrace to name and reputation. Here Shakespeare's biographers have nothing to go on. In addition he refers to having "born the canopy" (Sonnet 125), a reference to carrying the canopy over the head of the monarch during a wedding procession. There is no evidence that the man from Stratford ever came within a thousand yards of the Queen or ever carried any canopy. It would have been forbidden to a commoner.

Many books that were used as source material for the plays were not translated into English in Shakespeare’s time. Shakespeare's reliance on books in foreign languages puzzles the experts, so we can suppose all sorts of things rather than conclude the obvious. If the man who was Shakespeare regularly relied on books not yet translated from Italian, French, and Spanish, then he must have been able to read in Italian, French, and Spanish.

The assumption behind the support for William Shakespeare of Stratford as the author has to be that he was no ordinary mortal because otherwise there is no accounting for the detailed knowledge of the law, foreign languages, Italy, the court and aristocratic society, and sports such as falconry, tennis, jousting, fencing, and coursing that appears in the plays. I do not have any doubt that genius can spring from the most unlikely of circumstances. The only problem here is that there is in this case no evidence to support it. Would the greatest writer in the English language have allowed his daughters to remain illiterate?

Edward De Vere, on the other hand, was a recognized poet and playwright of great talent, and although no play under Oxford's name has come down to us, his acknowledged early verse and his surviving letters contain forms, words, and phrases resembling those of Shakespeare.

Sorry to burst your bubble. The Shakespeare plays and poems show that the author had specific knowledge of certain works of literature, certain prominent persons in Elizabeth's court, and events connected with them. In the sonnets and the plays there are frequent references to events that are paralleled in Oxford's life.

We know specifically that Oxford was fluent in four foreign languages, Latin, Greek, Italian, and French.

Of the 37 plays, 36 are laid in royal courts and the world of the nobility. The principal characters are almost all aristocrats with the exception perhaps of Shylock and Falstaff. From all we can tell, Shakespeare fully shared the outlook of his characters, identifying fully with the courtesies, chivalries, and generosity of aristocratic life. Lower class characters in Shakespeare are almost all introduced for comic effect and given little development. Their names are indicative of their worth: Snug, Stout, Starveling, Dogberry, Simple, Mouldy, Wart, Feeble, etc.

The history plays are concerned mostly with the consolidation and maintenance of royal power and are concerned with righting the wrongs that fall on people of high blood. His comedies are far removed from the practicalities of everyday life or the realistic need to make a living. Shakespeare's vision is a deeply conservative, feudalistic and aristocratic one. When he does show sympathy for the commoners as in Henry V speech to the troops, however, Henry is also shown to be a moralist and a hypocrite. He pretends to be a commoner and mingles with the troops in a disguise and claims that those commoners who fought with the nobility would be treated as brothers.

But we know there was no chance of that ever happening in feudal England. What can scarcely be overlooked is a compassionate understanding of the burdens of kingship combined with envy of the carefree lot of the peasant, who free of the "peril" of the "envious court", "sweetly…enjoys his thin cold drink" and his "sleep under a fresh tree's shade" with "no enemy but winter and rough weather". This would come naturally to a privileged nobleman.

In the Renaissance period in England no courtiers were allowed to publish poetry --this was an unwritten code of the court. The need for a pseudonym by an author-courtier such as Oxford would have been essential. Personally, I feel that the use of the Shakespeare pen name had more to do with Oxford's hidden relationship with the Queen, the possibility of their giving birth to an illegitimate child (Henry Wriothesley, the 2nd Earl of Southampton) and possibly his homosexual activities rather than any taboos against aristocrats.

This is just the tip of the iceberg but I hope it provides some food for thought and perhaps some questions or further reading.

To put it simply, the argument that Shakespeare did not write his plays is based upon the false assumption that he was not educated enough to have written them. Whatever that means. Actually as his father was mayor he was actually well educated. What they really mean is, how dare the greatest writer in the English language not be upper class. Actually because his father was mayor he would have received a good classical education. In fact literature and philosophy apparently made up practically everything he learnt. If he had produced a world beating equation perhaps that would be different. Also there is no historic evidence to link the plays with any of the people who are classed as more acceptable to have written them.It seems terrible that this great man has his lifes work and legacy to the world questioned. Why not question sir Francis Bacon: because he was upper class. I think personally that any film questioning Shakespeare's work should be boycotted: you cannot libel the dead. It attacks the ability of anyone below a certain standing to achieve. I wonder how many other things have been successfully edited out of history.

I don't have time to post at length on this but I agree with s12345. I have an undergraduate degree in English, which has been wonderful for coming to an appreciation of the plays as texts of literature, but my conviction that the plays were written by the man whose name they were eventually published under is bolstered by a lifetime of schooling in the ways of what might loosely be called the the medieval world.

If passages and turns of phrase in Shakespeare are to be found also in the writings of the Earl of Oxford, it may well be because he was requested to put them in the plays by the Earl himself, for personal reasons, or because the playwright sought to curry favour with the Earl by including them as little gems for the Earl to find.

Power politics is a full time full contact sport. There would be few titled aristocrats in Elizabethan England who were not fully absorbed in it. Personally I don't think anyone could write at the Shakespearean level without being fully absorbed in that.

Francis Bacon was not temperamentally suited to write the plays of Shakespeare. He also wrote extensively himself (under his own name) and was politically active.

Ben Jonson, a playwright contemporary with Shakspeare, was in a position to know who wrote the plays. He takes pains to underline it in his TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED MASTER WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, AND WHAT HE HATH LEFT US

www.luminarium.org...

And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seek
For names : but call forth thund'ring Aeschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread
And shake a stage : . . .

For though the poet's matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion : and, that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil ; turn the same,
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame ;
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn ;
For a good poet's made, as well as born.
And such wert thou !

In his well torned and true filed lines;
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandisht at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet Swan of Avon ! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza, and our James !