Why do people think shakespeare didn't exist?

Answer 1

Some people have trouble understanding what evidence is. They say things like:

"Shakespeare was an expert in military slang, kitchen slang, royal slang, sailing slang yet there is absolutely no reference of Shakespeare ever going to school. There is also no evidence that a man named William Shakespeare was ever born and when he died in 1616 no one seemed to notice. The only accepted documents that reference Shakespeare are 6 signatures written by Shakespeare himself. However, all of the signatures are different from the other and when studied by experts it is obvious that who ever signed those signatures was not educated. Therefore, by the lack of evidence of Shakespeare we can also disprove the existence of such man."

Let's take the first statement. We do not have any school records for Shakespeare, it's true. But that does not prove he didn't go to school. If he was aware of a large number of different kinds of slang, so what? They didn't teach that in school anyway.

Do we have a record of Shakespeare's birth? Not exactly, since we have a record of his baptism, and a date and place for it. Baptism records are accepted all over the world as evidence of birth in cases where no birth records are kept, except among anti-Stratfordians. Did anyone notice when he died? The church did when they kept records of his death and funeral. His wife did when she had a statue erected to him in the church. His friends did when they published his plays a few years later and said all kinds of nice things about him. They don't bury people who didn't exist. Saying that he didn't exist is completely stupid.

Actually there are a lot of documents referring to Shakespeare--court records, land ownership records, court of arms records, letters of friends, anecdotes in people's diaries. There may be no documents in Shakespeare's handwriting apart from the signatures (not that we'd recognize his handwriting if there were). But this is not evidence of anything--only that any documents in his handwriting have been destroyed in the last 400 years.

The fact is that documents which we haven't got prove nothing. The actual documentary evidence which we have (which is, by the way, much more than we have for almost all of Shakespeare's contemporary playwrights) all goes to show that William Shakespeare, gent. was a man from Stratford who was an actor and who wrote plays, including some of the most famous plays ever written.