Did Shakespeare write the plays attributed to him? The available evidence shows that, in all probability, Shakespeare was a real person who wrote his own plays.
William Shakespeare was definitely a real person. There is no record of his birth and his birthday of 23rd April was given to him by a much later biographer and there is no real evidence for it. His baptism in 1564 is recorded in his local church. He then disappears until he gets married in 1582 to Anne Hathaway. He disappears again before being recorded in London in 1592. There is no record of when he began writing plays or acting. His name is recorded on his plays and he is referenced by other playwrights and actors, but there is very little documentation about his life. He pops up here and there. He appears as a witness in a court case in 1612, for example. His death on April 23rd, 1616, is also recorded. Some people that don’t believe Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him use this lack of evidence to show that Shakespeare was perhaps not the person we think he is. However, and this was the same when we looked at the historical Jesus, it was very rare for people to be documented. The tradition of writing and documenting everything that we have now did not exist back then and many records will not have survived. Lack of documentation does not mean that a person didn’t exist. The fact that Shakespeare has been found on several documents is testament to the amount of research put into tracing his life.
People started to question whether Shakespeare was really the author of the plays attributed to him in the mid-1800s. The thinking was that someone who had an image to protect, possibly in the court, wrote the plays and used Shakespeare as a front to hide their name. This theory has been pretty much debunked. The people who advocate this theory say that the author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare had a knowledge of languages, literature, geography, and the court that Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have had. They also say that if Shakespeare was really the author, there would be more evidence and documentation. They put forward many different names as candidates, but the theories are not taken seriously. Let’s look at some of the reasons why.
The first argument is that Shakespeare was not named on many of his plays. There are many published sonnets, poems, and plays that bear his name. However, before 1600, the majority of his plays do not have his name, or any other author’s name on them. This is given as proof, but it is not proof because plays very rarely carried the author’s name. 70% of plays before 1600 do not have an author’s name on them, so Shakespeare not having his name on his plays is certainly not unusual. After 1600, he was more established and was earning more money from his plays, so he started to have his name put on them.
Shakespeare is documented as performing in the acting troop that performed his plays. His name is on lists of the actors that performed and he is mentioned by other people as performing in these plays. His plays were performed exclusively by his company because he wrote them for his company. If he hadn’t written the plays, they would presumably have been performed by other acting groups.
The evidence of Shakespeare’s life showed that he began life in the lower middle classes, fell on hard times, and then slowly increased in wealth and status. He ended up having shares in the Globe Theater, where his plays were exclusively performed. His rise in wealth in line with the popularity of his plays shows that he wrote them, as does the fact that they were exclusively played in the theater that he had shares in.
There may be a lack of evidence on Shakespeare’s plays themselves, but there is a lot of secondary evidence, Many other playwrights, poets, and diarists refer to Shakespeare in their writings. Some of them are positive and praise him and some of them criticize him. This is evidence that he was the author of the plays.
The two greatest arguments for the fact that Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him are that it is very unlikely for a conspiracy to be undiscovered and nobody until the 1800s doubted the authorship of Shakespeare. If there had been any doubt that Shakespeare was the author, it would have made an appearance at the time or in the years shortly after, but there is no doubt. Shakespeare definitely wrote his plays. And this is what I learned today.
Photo by Mike Bird: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-black-ceramic-male-profile-statue-under-grey-sky-during-daytime-189532/
Sources
https://shakespeareauthorship.com/howdowe.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question
https://www.history.com/news/did-shakespeare-really-write-his-own-plays
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare
https://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/prtshakelife.html