Who Wrote The Plays?

Will was born in Stratford, we have his birth records and then we have his marriage to Anne Hathaway and then we have the birth of his 3 children, Judith, Suzanna, and Hamnet, and then that’s it. For a long time, we really don’t get any other written records about him until another playwright, Robert Greene actually sort of takes a dig at Shakespeare. That is not for almost 15 years.

The final records, the hard records are at the end of his life when he bought this enormous house in Stratford and started buying up land and legal dealings, that is about it.

At the end of his life, his last will, it’s like he owned practically nothing. Other than the plays, there’s very few historical documents. That is the most troubling part of it, we don’t really get any historical documents about Shakespeare after the birth of his children.

It is fascinating to me that the greatest writer in the English language has so little written about him. His plays were hits. You think about a personality or a person like that today and people would be obsessively writing, recording, and analyzing everything that they do. Here is this guy who was absolutely brilliant and there is so little about him.

Then, when you start to dig into the plays and you start to look at the breadth of the knowledge, there’s even obscure references to falconry in lot of the plays.

You think, “well that is sort of strange to have in there.” Then there are these references to obscure herbs and gardening references. The breath of the knowledge becomes troubling. You think “well, maybe…Shakespeare himself wasn’t capable.”

There is no evidence that he was highly educated. There was no evidence that he was in any way shape or form involved in any of the things that are portrayed in the plays. Yet there is an intimate knowledge of foreign countries, but this is a guy who never left England, never left London, never left the tiny town that he grew up in other than to go to London.

We may not ever know what happened with the actual Shakespeare, the real author. There are a bunch of different arguments out there. Some people who say that the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere was the one who wrote the plays. He was the courtier who could not possibly be seen as part of the theater or possibly be seen saying the things that he said in the plays safely.

There are people that say that Francis Bacon must have done it. Then there are people who say there is a new theory out now that says it was a woman, actually a Jewish woman named Amelia Bassano Lanier who wrote them. There are good arguments for them.

Then there is also the group theory which is the idea of a whole group of guys were working together and they decided to all put it under the name of William Shakespeare, one of the members of the theater company. There is enough ambivalence, there is enough question that these other ideas are really quite interesting.

It might be Christopher Marlowe, some people say Christopher Marlowe faked his own death. Christopher Marlowe is a highly educated guy, brilliant guy, stabbed to death in a bar with a dagger through the right eye, but of course nobody was allowed to observe the body. So, there is a good chance that Christopher Marlowe faked his own death. Christopher Marlowe had intimate knowledge of all of the things that are in the Shakespeare plays. There are even lines that are written by Christopher Marlowe that mimic exactly some of the lines from Shakespeare.

“What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East and Juliet is the sun” is almost verbatim a line from a Marlowe play. A lot of people say that is the most famous line Shakespeare ever wrote.

But the language isn’t consistent from play to play. If you look at the difference between the language in the late romances vs the early plays you are going to see an incredible sort of fracturing of language. It really starts to break down. It starts to really change on a fundamental level, now that can be his evolution as an artist, absolutely, but some people posit that it’s not by the same person.