025: Did Shakespeare Write Shakespeare?

Intro
[Intro Tone]
So, the story begins like this.
We love a good conspiracy theory, the more absurd, the better. Some are rooted in something resembling truth that grows out of hand. Others rise from the use of coincidence to connect unrelated points in the production of truly wild conclusions. Now, you can already tell by my tone that I remain skeptical of conspiracy theories in general, and consider most to be a crime against reason. As a result, I usually don’t talk about them, let alone devote a podcast to one.
However, due to reasons I will explain shortly, I want to explore one conspiracy theory that has been raging for nearly two centuries.
Hello! And welcome to another episode of Plot Twisted History, where we dive down historical rabbit holes in search of the stories with surprises and plot twists along the way. I’m your host, David Nix, a writer of historical fiction and an amateur public historian. Today, we address the question, “were the works of William Shakespeare written by William Shakespeare, or was it somebody else.”
[Opening Music]
Act 1: The Accusation
In the world of English literature, there is William Shakespeare, a yawning gap, and then everybody else. He is venerated as not just the best English language writers in history, but perhaps *the* English language writer. And why not? He wrote 38 plays that we know of, many of which are considered the pinnacle of playwrighting and storytelling. He created iconic characters like Hamlet, Romeo, and Juliet that are templates for characters you see in mass media today.
He wrote two epic poems and over 100 sonnets, which are regarded as some of the best poetry of his era, and his use of blank verse became the standard after him. Because of his diversity of skill, he linked poetry, drama, and verse in a manner that hadn’t really been done before.
He introduced 1700 new words to the English language as either the first to write them down or inventing them on the spot, particularly in adding prefixes and suffixes to existing words. Words like bandit, critic, dwindle, lonely, addiction, laughing stock, manager, and swagger.
He created scores of phrases and idioms that we still use regularly today. Phrases like wild goose chase, break the ice, love is blind, good riddance, in a pickle, and star-crossed lovers.
Despite Shakespeare’s stellar accomplishments, for nearly half the period between his death and today, there have been whispers of conspiracy about the authorship of the plays. For the most part, the conspiracy pivots on a single question: How could a country boy without a university education have written some of the most iconic literature in the English language?
I intend to address this question in this episode, don’t you worry. Now, typically in this podcast, I tell a historical story and reveal the surprises and plot twists along the way. That said, today I will break that rule and give you the ending first, and then work through the story of why.
So, without further ado (which, by the way, is a phrase mistakenly attributed to Shakespeare but not actually coined by him) – without further ado, I will reveal the answer to the question, who wrote Shakespeare. It is my nearly 100% belief that the collected works of William Shakespeare were in actuality written by – William Shakespeare.
I apologize is this is a bit of a letdown, but the story behind the why and the history of the conspiracy is utterly fascinating as you will see. Now, why would I tip my hand so early in the episode? So that you know what kinds of podcast episode this is. This is a serious, though often humorous, addressing the conspiracy question where there will be no appearance of aliens or lost continents.
When addressing a topic like this, it is critical to draw a distinction between mystery and conspiracy theory. For example, who built Stonehenge, what happened to Amelia Earhart, and who was Jack the Ripper. These are all mysteries that have not been solved and may never be solved. Conspiracy theory, on the other hand, are explanations for the mysteries that delve into speculation so deep that it often veers into the absurd.
For example, aliens built Stonehenge, or Amelia Earhart was captured by the Japanese Imperial Army, of Jack the Ripper was Prince Albert. The challenge of conspiracy theories is that, although they cannot be proven – largely because they are absurd – but they can’t be easily disproven. I have no direct proof that aliens did not built Stonehenge, nor can I prove that Stonehenge was not built by giants, dragons, of ocean-hopping intelligent kangaroos.
What we are left with, then, is Occam’s Razor – that the most likely explanation is usually the most plausible. For example, the most likely explanation for Stonehenge is that a large number of humans built it slowly over time through sheer effort, just like the builders of the great medieval cathedrals did. Keep Occam’s Razor in mind, because we will come back to it in the end.
Finally, before we dive in to depths, you may be asking why I would interrupt my normal storytelling approach to produce an episode about a historical mystery and a prevalent conspiracy theory? As it turns out, I have an extremely good reason. I recently wrote a novel called the Shakespeare Secret which is slated for release in July 2025, and here is the premise:
Frustrated by societal restrictions that prohibit women from writing for the stage, three late 16th century women from different classes band together in secret to write plays and hire a footloose actor called Will Shakespeare as their front man.
(gasp) Conspiracy theory! Why, man, why?
Well, now that you know where I stand, you can be rest assured that this is not a breathless expository thinly disguising a novel as a thesis on a conspiracy theory. It is simply “historical fiction”, with emphasis on the “fiction”. Emphasis on the “what-if”. As in, what if the Nazis had developed the bomb first?
There are two reasons I could write a story like this. One, the fact that Shakespeare’s authorship has been contested. Two, that women of the era were mostly illiterate, few had an education sufficient to write plays, and the few who did faced social pressure to not do this sort of thing and stick with acceptable accomplishments.
The what-if of my novel is not “what if Shakespeare didn’t write his plays”, but rather “what if women had been given an equal access to education and opportunity as men? What great works of literature, philosophy, theology, science, and mathematics would we have now that were never created because a brilliant mind was denied education and opportunity?
Regardless of the obstacles and the tiny number of sufficiently educated women of Shakespeare’s era, some did produce work that was not only groundbreaking but still echoes through the arts today. I feature a couple of these real women in my novel, and will come around to one of them later.
But for now, on to William Shakespeare.
Before we get into the conspiracy theories about his authorship, we should ask ourselves what we actually know about William Shakespeare. Most people have a vague sense that we know a lot more about him than we really do. There is a reason for this, which we will come to in due course. Despite the fact that he wrote almost 40 of the most famous plays in the English language – or any language, for that matter we know very little about him.
Why is this? Let me explain it like this. Today we live in an age of journalism with tens of thousands of people and an entire industry dedicated to recording and sharing what happened today – particularly as it involves famous people.
Today we might not know much about a person who is not famous unless we happen to know them personally. If that person dies without achieving fame, what is remembered of them several generations onward will mostly be from the times they entered the public record – birth, marriage, death, legal proceedings, etc.
However, when a person achieves enough fame to get the attention of the journalism industry, enterprising journalists learn everything they can about the person’s back story by talking to family members, friends, work colleagues, their primary school reading teacher, and that neighbor who doesn’t really know the person but saw them out mowing the grass a few times. And so, we end up knowing more than we care to know about the famous person.
For people living in Shakespeare’s day of the late 1500s and early 1600s, the first part of this equation was true – there wasn’t much recorded about them outside of church and legal records. However, the second part of the equation was false – fame did not immortalize your story. Why was this? Because journalism as we know it did not exist at all. The earliest inklings of what we could call journalism would not begin to emerge for half a century after Shakespeare’s death.
Case in point: The most famous person of the day was Elizabeth the First, queen of England. However, we know very little about what she thought. The little we do know was primarily through letters written by her, to her, or about her that were preserved. In fact, what little we know of most people of this era is through letters.
In other words, to really know the mind of a person of that era, they or someone close to them would have needed to write a letter. Those receiving the letter would have needed to decide to keep the letter and not use it for kindling. And their descendants coming across the letters at the death of their ancestor would have needed to also decide to keep the letter, and this would have needed to carry on for enough generations that somebody eventually copied the information in the letter into something like a history book.
With that premise, what do we actually know without a doubt about Shakespeare? As I said, not much, but here we go. Let’s start – with what he looked like. Most people on the planet if presented the likeness of William Shakespeare could probably identify him – he is that famous the world over. Despite that fact, there is no known portrait of Shakespeare that shows beyond a doubt what he looked like. Not only that, there are only three candidates.
One is a portrait of a balding but handsome man bought by the Chandos family in 1747 – 150 years after Shakespeare’s heyday – that was said to be a portrait of him. Historians have dated the painting and style of clothing worn by the subject to the correct period – about 1590 when Shakespeare was just starting out. It was eventually given in 1856 to Britain’s National Potrait Gallery as its founding work. Regardless, because the first 150 years of the portrait’s history remain a mystery, it could be of anybody.
The second portrait of Shakespeare is a copperplate engraving that appears on the front of the first collection of his works – the famous First Folio printed in 1623 by his closest friends, seven years after his death. The engraving was done by Martin Droeshout, who was young, inexperienced, and perhaps never saw Shakespeare in person. And if he has seen him, he would have been working from a year’s old memory. The engraving itself is comically bad, almost cartoonish. As such, it is more like an avatar of Shakespeare than a likeness of him.
The third and final likeness is a painted, life-size statue that forms the centerpiece of a wall monument to Shakespeare at Holy Trinity Church in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. As with the engraving, it is a mediocre piece of artwork, but it was executed by a mason called Gheerart Janssen who probably did see Shakespeare in person. Because the carving is more like a relief than a statue, the original paint would have given it the definition needed to call it a likeness of Shakespeare. Since its installation, though, the carving has been repainted, stripped of paint, and later repainted.
So, really, we think we know approximately what he looked like, as if peering at someone from a distance, but we don’t know exactly what he looked like. And this lack of information defines everything else about the man. Although he wrote a million words of literature, we only have 14 words written in his own hand. His original manuscripts are lost, as are the originals of anything else he wrote. Only copies or copies of copies remain.
We have six copies of his signatures from various legal documents. None of them are spelled the same, and none of them match the spelling we use today. And, of course, it is just this kind of mystery and lack of information that has opened the door to so many conspiracy theories – which we will get to shortly. I promise.
[Transition Music]
Act 2: The Facts
In chronological order, here is what we do know. William Shakespeare was born to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden in April of 1564. We don’t know the exact day of his birth, but we know he was christened on April 26. The date of April 23 has been a best guess for his birthday, although because he also died on that day, April 23 might just be the date assigned to give his life perfect symmetry. Oh, and to add confusion, this date is under the old Julian Calendar. Under the Gregorian calendar used today, his actual birthdate would have been May 3rd.
Shakespeare’s mother was from a prominent family connected to nobility, and his father was a man of importance in Stratford-upon-Avon. As such, he would have had access to the education offered there, although we don’t have a record of it. They did not record such things at the time.
We know that William had three brothers and four sisters, that only one sister survived childhood, and that his brothers never married.
We know that when William was 12 years old, his father fell into some trouble that caused him to retire from public life. We don’t know why, but it may have been related to avoiding debt collectors.
We know that at the age of 18, William applied for a marriage license to Anne Hathaway, which the recorder miswrote as Anne Whately, but that her name was correctly spelled on the marriage bond. We also know that Anne was eight years William’s senior, was pregnant, and that the Shakespeare family paid the equivalent of $20,000 to get a special license. Normally, the banns had to be read in church for three consecutive Sundays, but the special license required only one reading.
His daughter’s Susanna’s birth was recorded six months later in May of 1583, and the birth of twins, Hamnet and Judith, was recorded two years later. So, for the first 21 years of Shakespeare’s life, we have exactly 4 pieces of verifiable information about him: his christening, his marriage, and the two births of his three children. That’s it.
To make matters worse, Shakespeare then drops off the face of the earth in terms of verifiable information for the next seven years. We have no idea what he did during that time, but somewhere along the way, he became an actor, ended up in London, and had begun writing plays – by the year 1592.
“Now,” you say, “We get to the meat. This is where we begin to learn about William Shakespeare the man.” After all, he will soon become the most celebrated playwright in London, right?
In a word, “no”. To any of it. Though Shakespeare began making a mark in the London theater, nobody – and I mean nobody – thought he was the preeminent writer of his day and certainly would not have predicted his enduring fame. Also, we don’t know exactly when he wrote each play and exactly when each was first performed. For this reason, nearly everyone who tries listing the chronology of his plays comes up with a different list. In fact, four of the most highly regarded biographies of his life all list a different play as his first. Again, we suffer from an incredible lack of journalism at the time.
However, here is what we do know. His plays were on the stage in London by 1591. And despite writing plays, he did something almost no other playwrights did: he continued to be an actor. He is listed as the principal actor of a play four times on documents that have survived: 1592, 1598, 1603, and 1608. In other words, years that span most of his career in London.
By September of 1592, he was sufficiently well-known as a playwright that a rival playwright, Robert Greene, took time to excoriate him in one of his pamphlets, calling him an “upstart crow” for daring to write popular plays without first having achieved a university education. The publisher of the pamphlet thought the accusation sufficiently bad that he publicly apologized to Shakespeare. Apparently, nobody liked Robert Greene.
The next year, Shakespeare published the epic poem “Venus and Adonis”. This might be the closest we come to his inner thoughts, because he wrote a cheesy dedication to the young and wildly popular Lord Southampton, perhaps because he knew him or maybe because he was seeking sponsorship. The next year, he released another epic poem, again with a dedication. Despite the financial success of the poems, Shakespeare did not write another epic poem and instead devoted all of his time to playwriting from then on.
And speaking of playwriting, I should say something about what playwriting looked like during the golden age of the London theater. The first playhouse was opened in London in 1576, after which other theaters sprang up because Londoners could not get enough plays. These theaters enjoyed enormous success, drawing a sizeable percentage of the entire London population from literally every class every week – for decades.
During this time, the theater was *the* form of entertainment and escape for the masses of London, which made acting troupes and theater owners quite financially successful. This golden age of the London Theater lasted a bit more than60 years before the dour Puritans shut them down. Historically speaking, you can count on the religious fundamentalists to kill all the fun while continuing to engage in their own vices, like amassing wealth and committing state-sanctioned murder. But I digress.
Today, we tend to think of plays as *serious* literary works, similar to novels, where the writer might spend an entire year crafting the work such that it achieves a certain bar of quality and perhaps endures through the ages. We see plays that run on Broadway for years, spanning thousands of performances, with millions attending the plays and many attending the same play repeatedly.
Plays during Shakespeare’s day were nothing like this. The London theater of the day was more like network television of today. The demand for plays was hot, and customers expected new plays every week. As a result, most plays were staged no more than a few times – unless they were very popular, in which case they might be staged a dozen times or more. In short, the London stage was a beast that needed to be fed on a regular basis to keep the money rolling in to the acting troupes and playhouses. A slowdown in new plays meant a reduction of revenue.
To meet this demand, playwrights cranked out plays at an incredible rate. Most serious playwrights produced a new play every one to two months. In fact, Shakespeare was not very prolific compared to other playwrights of the day, with 38 plays across 23 years. During that same period, some of his peers created 200 plays.
To produce plays at this frenetic rate, playwrights did exactly what television writers do today. They recycled old stories, stole ideas, practiced light plagiarism, and wrote sequels when a play was popular at the box office. Shakespeare was no different in that respect. He did all these things.
As a result, plays were considered throwaway work by the acting troupes that owned them and the playhouses that staged them. They weren’t meant to last beyond a single season, and their slapdash quality often reflected this. Because these were not considered high-brow literature, playwrights were paid peanuts for their work – maybe $500 in today’s money Many famous playwrights died in poverty.
However, I’ve already mentioned that Shakespeare took a different path by continuing to act. Sure, this likely accounted for his lower output, but it also meant that he owned a share of the acting company of which he was a part – which would eventually become The Lord Chamberlain’s Men.
We know that Shakespeare’s share of the revenue was somewhere between one-fourteenth and one-tenth. This share would have earned him a similar wage to a schoolmaster, which was respectable. However, when the acting company opened their own playhouse, those shares became golden. In Shakespeare’s case, it made him a man of means.
How do we know? We have a few legal records involving Shakespeare. In one, he was a witness in lawsuit. Several times, though, he purchased property – twice in London and twice in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. His property purchases were for impressive amounts, so we can see that theater ownership made him a comfortably wealthy man.
Beyond that, we know that in 1596, his son Hamnet died at age 11. Likely that same year he wrote Hamlet. One of Hamlet’s famous lines is this:
Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me.
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
Those are the words of a grieving father, recognizable to anyone who has suffered the loss of a child – and yet still we don’t know if he wrote them because of Hamnet’s death.
We know that Shakespeare defaulted on a small loan in 1597 and again the next year, perhaps indicating that he was tightfisted or forgetful.
We know that in 1598, his name first appears on a published copy of one of his plays. This was normally only done for playwrights that the public would know by name. Around this time, his name was mentioned by other writers with admiration. His name even appeared in another play, with the line “O sweet Mr. Shakespeare. I have his picture in my study at the court” – suggesting he was kind of a literary pinup.
We know that in 1601, Shakespeare’s acting company was dragged unwillingly into a treason plot, where the plotters hoped to use one of Shakespeare’s plays to rile up the masses against the queen and then go depose her. The company staged the play, and the plotters set out to dethrone the queen. They failed miserably and many of them were executed for it. During the subsequent investigation, it was determined that the acting company was not involved the plot, whereupon the queen invited them to perform for her personally at Court.
We know that in 1608, Shakespeare began collaborating with other playwrights in the writing of his final plays. We don’t know why, but I have a theory. As he was 44 years old by now, and as most people become nearsighted in their 40s and 50s, perhaps he was having trouble seeing what he was writing. Collaboration would have helped him continue his efforts. Or, perhaps he was just tired. In 1613, he produced his last known play and was back in Stratford by early 1616 at the latest.
And in 1616, he updated his will – which had some unusual clauses – and then died on his birthday a month later. As I mentioned, the coincidence of his birth and death dates might have been finagled. Or he might have celebrated with too much drink and it killed him. The fact that he had just updated his will, though, might indicate that he was in ill health at the time.
So, that’s all we know about William Shakespeare in life. Very little when you consider that he is one of the most well-known people in all of human history.
And so now – onto the conspiracy. But because the conspiracy took a long time to flower, we need to travel a bit of a twisted road to get there.
[Transition Music]
Act 3: The Conspiracy
When Shakespeare died in 1616, he was well-regarded but not considered anything spectacular. In fact, most people of the day considered his rival, Ben Jonson, a superior playwright, given Jonson’s more literary notions and prose. I already mentioned that plays were considered throwaway, so only about 20% of the plays written during Shakespeare’s day survived to the present. However, all of Shakespeare’s plays survived because two of his best friends and acting colleagues gathered his manuscripts after his death and published them as the famous First Folio in 1623.
Though it sold well enough to be reprinted twice, Shakespeare’s collected works still did not bring him lastin fame – at first. It wasn’t until nearly 100 years after his death that Nicolas Rowe, Britain’s poet laureate, wrote the first biography of Shakespeare. In the 1740s, London’s premiere actor, David Garrick, began to resurrect Shakespeare’s plays and became famous in his most recognizable roles.
This renewed interest in Shakespeare led to a flood of other biographies and an increase in the staging of his plays. Nearly all of these early biographies contain hearsay, legend, and frankly invented stories that sought to fill the holes in Shakespeare’s life. As a result, much of what you think you know about Shakespeare is likely invented. Every specific anecdote about him is simply an invented fiction.
Sometime along the way, a few people privately asked the question, “How could a country boy without a university degree have made such an enduring contribution to English literature?” As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, this is really *the* question about Shakespeare.
That said, the conspiracy didn’t get going in earnest until the mid-1800s and in, of all places, the United States. It arrived in the form of a woman from the U.S. state of Ohio called Delia Bacon. From a poor family, Delia was described as bright, very pretty, and not very stable. As an adult, she went to live with her pastor brother in Connecticut where she taught school, wrote some fiction, and lived the life of a spinster.
Her one foray into romance was with a theological student many years her junior, with whom she developed an almost obsessive attachment. She eventually learned that the so-called relationship was a lark to the student, who read her passionate letters to his friends to mock her. This event appeared to leave a deep wound that drove her into various other obsessions.
She gradually developed the conviction that the real author of the works of William Shakespeare was her namesake, Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare and pioneer of the scientific method. This despite the fact that Francis Bacon had no obvious connection to or interest in the theater. In 1852, Delia traveled to England to prove that Shakespeare was a fraud.
Despite her odd ideas, there must have been something earnestly charming about Delia, because she managed to sway a number of influential people to her cause – though most would live to regret their support. She found financial support from Charles Butler and Thomas Carlyle, the latter having been introduced to her by famous writer Ralph Waldo Emerson.
To prove her case, Delai stayed in St. Albans, the hometown of the long dead Francis Bacon, for 10 months. While there, she did – nothing. She claimed to have spoken to no one, and turned down Carlyle’s attempts to introduce her to scholars who might help her. She sought no information from archives, museums, or scholars. Instead, she spent time at various locations in the city sitting silently and “absorbing the atmosphere” to refine her ideas.
From there, she began writing a book. By 1857, her big moment had arrived when she published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare. Nathanial Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, wrote the preface for the book without having read it. He regretted that kindness. The 675-page book proved to be unreadable, and nowhere did it mention the name Francis Bacon. Delia was convinced that readers would guess him as the correct author without her having to spell it out. Needless to say, the book was largely panned.
A by now exhausted Delia Bacon returned to the United States, was admitted to an asylum for the insane, and died two years later, believing herself to be the Holy Ghost. Please understand, I’m not making light of her poor mental health. Those who suffer from mental illness of any kind require our empathy and any assistance we can offer. However, I do you want you to understand where the Shakespeare conspiracies germinated, and fraught and fragile nature of the mind that gave them life.
Despite the problems of Delia Bacon’s book, her theory took root with a lot of other people who were perfectly rational. Writers Mark Twain and Henry James became ardent supporters of the theory. Many supporters believed that the text of the plays contained a code whereby Francis Bacon would reveal himself as the author. One after another, they produced books that used contorted logic to reveal vague clues about Bacon’s authorship or Shakespeare’s lack thereof. Funnily enough, a pastor called Reverend Nicholson trolled the doubters by using their very own techniques to “reveal” Shakespeare as the author.
Well, the Baconian theory just wouldn’t die. Eventually, its adherents had “proved” that not only did Bacon write all of Shakespeare’s works, he wrote the works of many other playwrights of the day, including Marlowe, Kyd, and the aforementioned Robert Greene, as well as Spenser’s The Fairy Queen, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Montaigne’s Essays (in French, no less), and the entire King James version of the Bible. Forget the 70 ancient language scholars who claimed to have done that last one. “It was Bacon,” they said. “And everyone loves Bacon.”
Overlooked by his admirers was the fact that Bacon was a very busy man with all the work we know he produced and he openly derided the theater as frivolous in his various essays. When the evidence against Bacon began to pile up, the conspiracy theorists looked elsewhere. They found salvation in the form of a schoolmaster from Gateshead, England called J. Thomas Looney. I kid ye not. In 1918, Looney, who insisted his name was pronounced Loney, published his masterwork entitled Shakespeare Identified.
In his book, Looney laid out the premise that Shakespeare lacked the education or experience in the world to write what he wrote and to have access to the knowledge that imbued his work. This included things like his seeming knowledge of Court protocol, all things Italian, medicine, English history, and the like. Looney proposed instead Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Only a learned nobleman could accomplish such a feat, right?
Well, De Vere had a few issues as the candidate for the author of Shakespeare’s works. First, he was widely seen as arrogant, petulant, spoiled, and given to fits of violence. At the age of 17, he murdered a household servant in a fit of fury. The cowed jury ruled that the servant had run onto De Vere’s sword of his own volition, so De Vere escaped punishment. In short, he was not the sort of man who spoke with such compassionate, steady calm found in Shakespeare’s plays.
I agree that this argument is highly subjective. However, it turns out that De Vere also wrote a couple of plays in his own name. Those who read the plays said they weren’t very good. So, why would an arrogant man publicly release two mediocre plays while denying the writing of brilliant plays that the public loved? It doesn’t make much sense.
Even if you accept that maybe he was just weird and misunderstood in that way, De Vere had one more issue. He died in 1604, nine years before Shakespeare’s retirement. To support the De Vere theory, you would need to believe that he had a stockpile of brilliant work that someone released on his behalf for a decade after his death. Oh, and you’d have to accept that he had predicted very specific real-life events that appear in those later plays.
Regardless of the problems, many rationale people flocked to the flag of the Earl of Oxford as Shakespeare, including Sigmund Freud and Orson Wells.
Another theory posited that Christopher Marlowe, a rival playwright, had written Shakespeare’s works. Why a man writing very popular plays in his name would allow a rival to take credit for some of his other plays seems odd. Not to mention that Marlowe was murdered in 1593. However, a conspiracy theory is the snake that eats its own tail. Supporters of the Marlowe as Shakespeare theory suggest his death was faked, and he continued writing in secret for 20 years without a single person breathing a word of the truth. Enough people believed it that his grave marker in Westminster Abbey had a question mark added after his death date – and this happened in 2002. This despite Marlowe’s death being very public.
As many as 50 people have been proposed as the author or authors of Shakespeare’s work, including Mary Sydney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke. Honestly, her candidacy has the fewest problems, lacking any of the gobstoppers of the other candidates. Mary Sydney Herbert was the sister of a famous poet and she financially supported a ring of poets called the Wilton Circle.
When her poet brother died young, he had finished less than one-third of his project to translates the Biblical book of Psalms into English verse of various forms. Mary took over the task and finished the last two-thirds of it. The result was so good that it became one of the most lasting influences on English poets for generations with its dazzling array of verse form.
Mary Sydney Herbert also translated various works from French to English, including Antonius, which Shakespeare apparently used as a source for his play Antoney and Cleopatra. Oh, and her husband was the patron of an acting company called Lord Pembroke’s Men, the first acting troupe to stage Shakespeare’s plays. And finally, she had the best reason of all to remain anonymous: women were strongly discouraged from writing non-religious works and associating with the productions of the crass London theaters – especially noblewomen. Of all the candidates, she is the most difficult to rule out, which is why my purely fiction novel features her as one of the main characters. She is at least plausible.
In fact, Mary Sydney Herbert is a good segue to the assertion I made at the beginning of this episode – that the works of William Shakespeare were written by William Shakespeare. After shaking the conspiracy tree hard enough that one plausible candidate falls out, we must turn, then, to the addressing the arguments against Shakespeare.
First and foremost, detractors have complained that he lacked the education, not having attended university. How much education he did have is unprovable, as there are no public records of such things from that time in Stratford. However, Stratford-upon-Avon was known to possess one of the best public schools in the entire country – New King’s School. Its headmasters were all Oxford graduates who were paid more than the professors at Oxford.
Stratford’s school was open to any boy between the ages of seven and fifteen who could read and write. As the son of one of Stratford’s most prominent citizens, it stands to reason that Shakespeare would have attended the school. The school day was eleven to twelve hours long, six days per week. The school was famous for its rigor in the reading, writing, and reciting of Latin. The study of Latin, at its base, is a study of rhetorical devices and ploys. In other words, what a playwright would need to know.
By the way, the playwright of Shakespeare’s time considered to be the most scholarly was Ben Jonson. He also did not earn a university degree, and yet no one accuses him of faking authorship, even though most of his plays have also survived to this day.
Also, the modern western world absolutely celebrates those who rise above circumstance through hard work and talent to become more than they were born to be. We love this version of the hero’s journey. However, for whatever reason, many who love this notion won’t give William Shakespeare credit for having done just that, despite ample evidence of his work ethic and strategic thinking.
In terms of the breadth of his knowledge, let me just say this. I once wrote a science fiction novel where I described how a nuclear reactor works. This does not make me a nuclear physicist. What it does mean is that I know a nuclear physicist who explained to me in laymen’s terms how a reactor works, and I wrote it down.
Every author I know works this way. When we need to write something plausible about something we don’t know, we use a knowledgeable source. William Shakespeare lived in one of the largest, most well-connected cities on the planet. He had sources for just about any information at his fingertips. In fact, his first historical plays, which were about the English Civil War, practically plagiarize a couple of well know history books of the day. In other words, William Shakespeare did what every author in history has done, but somehow, he doesn’t get credit for it from his detractors.
Anyway, if what I suggest about his education and talent doesn’t sway you, then perhaps this will. William Shakespeare was an actor in London, with direct evidence that he was acting on the stage between 1592 and 1608, but probably longer. He was a member of at least one acting troupe for nearly two decades, working with them weekly during that time in the production and staging of plays both in London and touring the countryside. His two best friends in the troupe, John Hemings and Henry Condell, were the men who gathered and published his manuscripts as The First Folio in 1623.
Also, during that time, Shakespeare collaborated with at least two playwrights, and there is evidence that he collaborated with others – at the beginning and end of his career. Some of the playwrights in his orbit were friends, but others, like Ben Jonson, were bitter rivals. Some, like Robert Greene, hated him.
So, for a career in London that spanned over 20 years working alongside a horde of actors and playwrights, including some who would have killed to have outed him as a fraud, not a single person anywhere in any way ever suggested that Shakespeare was not the author of his plays, nor did anyone ever propose that someone else wrote his plays.
Sometimes they derided him, and other times applauded him, but never did any of the people who knew him call him a fraud. In fact, when the First Folio was published, guess who wrote the dedication? Why, Ben Jonson, of course – his staunchest rival. And in his dedication, Ben Jonson applauds Shakespeare for his work.
More than 200 years would pass before anyone would publicly question Shakespeare’s authorship. The last person who might have known him personally, his granddaughter, died in 1670 – over 180 years before Delia Bacon had a notion about Shakespeare as a fraud. And what is the first rule of historical sources? I’ve mentioned it before. The further in time a new idea is from the event, the less likely it is to be true.
This brings us back to Occam’s Razor – that the simplest explanation is likely to be the correct one. And in this case, Occam’s Razor tells us that the works of William Shakespeare were written by – William Shakespeare.
And that, my friends, is the story.
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If you want to learn more, I recommend Shakespeare by one of my favorite authors, Bill Bryson. He breaks down Shakespeare’s life in under 200 easily-read pages, including addressing the facts and conspiracies. There are any number of wonderful “what-if” novels about Shakespeare, including Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name. Oh, and my novel, the Shakespeare Secret by D.J. Nix. Those you can read for fun.
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Thank you for listening to this episode of Plot Twisted History. I have been your host, David Nix. If you found this podcast interesting, you can help expand its reach by leaving a five-star review on the podcast platform of your choice. And please, recommend this podcast to others who might find it interesting.
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And so, until we meet again, may your story hold surprises and your plots be slightly twisted.