Does it take a university education to be a great writer?
If yes, then we should cross out quite a few names from our lists, starting with Homer and going onto Shelley, Keats, Austen, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Eliot (G), Orwell and on and on. Interestingly, Dan Brown, Danielle Steele and Stephanie Meyer all went to prestigious posh universities.
This brings us to the elephant in the living room, the one name that I have not included in the list. Did the Bard really write the thirty-eight plays that he is credited for? Or was Shakespeare merely a front man for other men of higher birth- such as Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford?
So, a man from a humble background and no posh education could not have written about foreign places and historical events. Only an aristocrat, a man of noble birth and education, could have written something as profound as “… the better part of valor is discretion.” It takes an aristo to understand that the plebs of London would only be swayed through bawdy jokes such as : “By my life, this is my lady’s hand: these be her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s; and thus makes she her great P’s.”
Yes, you have to be quite the cunt to miss the obvious, eh, you Shakespeare lovers?
Who among us would ever disagree that the Romantic poets wrote their own (profound albeit self-indulgent) verses? Would anyone think that Elizabeth Bennet had stolen her wits and disposition from Lady Catherine De Burgh? Would an aristocrat lady write the words of anguish: “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?” Would any aristocrat be able to depict the horrors of the poor house in Victorian England?
So why do we keep coming back to this absurd notion that Shakespeare did not write his plays?
We know that he was not an obscure behind-the-scenes figure. He was always credited as the author on stage. He had enjoyed friendships of Ben Jonson and quite possibly Christopher Marlowe- expert playwrights with substantive contribution to Literature themselves. Do you think that these gentlemen of immense ego would have tolerated as a friend someone who had no literary merit and yet claimed such a thing?
A man of humble birth from Stratford, having been married at the age of eighteen, went to London to earn a living. He became an actor and stage manager and began writing his own plays. They were designed to be crowd pleasers- full of dirty jokes and royalty and the most profound of human emotions: love, hate, jealousy and ambition. He made a fortune as a writer of these tales and then went home to enjoy the twilight years of his life in company of his family.
But this story is not enough for those who think that only rich people can accomplish great things. According to these people, Steve Jobs would have been the bastard child of a Rockefeller or a Kennedy. Einstein was probably stealing the work of a Rothschild.
Why not make a movie about those two?
I am in full agreement. The whole "Did Shakespeare really write the plays that bear his name?" argument is teeth grindingly lame. The idea that a writer would write all of his greater works under a pseudonym, taking great pains to make nobody knew... saving his own name for the second tier stuff?
ReplyDeletePlease. Spare me this nonsense.
The worst part is the influx of morons into the library this will create. Morons because they'll be interested not in Shakespeare and his work --but in some bullshit conspiracy theory about same.