William Shakespeare Controversy

William Shakespeare is regarded by many to be the greatest playwright to have ever lived. He is famous for works such as Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet, as well as many other plays. His fame, however, has been met with some skepticism. How is it that the world’s most renowned author never had received education past grade school? Yet his plays show that the author had an extensive knowledge in politics, sciences, law, and many other subjects that require a higher education. This is just one of the many points of evidence that show that William Shakespeare could not have written his plays. Some famous doubters of the authenticity of William Shakespeare’s plays are Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, Orson Wells, and many others.

“William Shakespeare’s will is four pages long and handwritten by an attorney. In these four pages there is no indication that he was a writer. The will mentions not a single book, play, poem, or unfinished literary work, or scrap of manuscript of any kind. The absence of books in the will is telling, since to write his works William Shakespeare would have had to have access to hundreds of books. The plays are full of expertise on a wide variety of subjects including contemporary and classical literature, multiple foreign languages, a detailed knowledge of Italian language and culture, the law, medicine, military matters, sea navigation, painting, mathematics, astrology, horticulture, music, and a variety of aristocratic sports like bowls and falconry. What happened to the hundreds of valuable books he would have assumedly collected during his lifetime? An exhaustive search of every bookcase within fifty miles of Stratford done in the 18th century failed to find a single book formerly belonging to the “world’s greatest author” (Shakespeare Oxford

“William Shakespeare was born in April of 1564 in the small village of Stratford-on-Avon. There is no official record of his birthday, but he was christened on april 26, 1564. His name as given was Gulielmus Shaksper. Gulielmus was the scribe’s Latin spelling of William. The Shaksper family’s name is spelled dozens of different ways, but the most frequent, in his own time, was Shaxper, or Shaksper. The boy’s father, John Shaksper was a glove maker, and William Shaksper was a grocer, grain trader, and landlord by profession. No one in the village of Stratford thought of him as learned, bookish, poetical, or theatrical, nor are there any legends, let alone records, of him producing any local entertainment. The local records only confirm that William Shaksper was a merchant not a lyricist of genius of letters (Elizabethan