I don’t actually much care who wrote Shakespeare’s plays –
just love and revere him, whoever he is. But I have to say I think the case
against Shakespeare the actor is weaker than the case against any alternative
so far suggested by Sir Derek and the other sceptics. Apart from the much-touted arguments against him, is it credible
that the company at the Globe and elsewhere could have rehearsed and performed
the plays and been deceived into believing their colleague wrote them when he
didn’t? Wouldn't he have been consulted about the meaning of this line or that,
about stage ‘business’, about the meaning of one of the words he invented? If
he wasn’t the author, wouldn’t it have been a case of ‘Bill? - thick as three
planks – he couldn’t possibly have written Hamlet. He’s having us
on.’? Wouldn’t someone have mentioned
that the scripts kept arriving in a plain brown envelope with nobody’s name on
it? Instead of which the members of the company – and his writer colleagues and
friends Chris Marlowe and Ben Jonson and the rest – were desolated when he
died, celebrated him as a great writer, and two of them actually worked on
producing his Collected Plays.
No, I think Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, and none of the
alternatives convince.
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