shakespeare authorship question
For 200 years the question didn't occur to anybody. So I'm afraid it's not going to go away. And it's not a matter that we want to discuss further, either within the films or in the forum. But one of the officials in the heralds' office who gave out these coats of arms said that various people from vulgar backgrounds, sort of insufficiently high-class people, were getting coats of arms. That's the golden bullet. And among them, he said, was Shakespeare the player. [1] Who really wrote 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. Now, you might say, if you're a conspiracy theorist, well, that's only saying that these works were performed and published with the name William Shakespeare on the page. So there's a tight nexus of relationships between these people. Reid: Well, you certainly convinced me. So nobody doubts that Shakespeare the player, came from Stratford, was the son of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden. So the complaint about the coat of arms for Shakespeare the player is intimately linked to the references back to Stratford. We're in week one of Shakespeare and His World, and it's bound to have come up by now. And what's more, that man was William Camden, one of the most learned men in England. The scientific argument behind this claim is known as the Shakespeare authorship question. So we’d like to just address the question in person and put it to bed once and for all. There is lots of empirical evidence to repute these theories. We’re in week one of Shakespeare and His World, and it’s bound to have come up by now. Celebrating Shakespeare is at the heart of everything we do. There was a schoolmaster called Thomas Looney who accepted it wasn't Bacon, but again thought; how could this grammar schoolboy from the provinces have known so much about courts and aristocracy? For example, the fact that Shakespeare got into print with "Venus and Adonis", his narrative poem, the most popular poem of the age, the poem that made his name. Indeed, Jonson talks in his conversations with other writers in his notebooks about Shakespeare's techniques of writing. Bate: OK, thanks very much, Jen. Using doubt about Shakespeare’s authorship as our playground, we will explore the key concept of authorship attribution, while developing skills in literary analysis, interpretation, and argument. reasonable doubt about the identity of Willian Shakespeare. So we find him here, for example, saying that just as the Latin tongue, the Latin language was glorified by great writers like Virgil, and Ovid, and Horace, so the English language has been glorified by the wonderful poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, William Warner, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Chapman. © 2020 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Registered Charity Number 209302, Read the latest about our response to Covid-19 'To be, or not to be; that is the question [...] .'. In this video, Professor Jonathan Bate joins Jennifer Reid to discuss the question of who wrote the plays of William Shakespeare. Reid: Hi, I'm Jennifer Reid, and I am the course mentor on Shakespeare and His World. Rylance finds a compelling logic in the Shakespeare conspiracy theories: "The nature of authorship was different then," he argues. 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