Why do people think that Shakespeare didn't write Romeo and Juliet?

Answer 1

Actually, just about everyone is satisfied that Shakespeare did write Romeo and Juliet. There are reasons to believe that parts of some of his other plays (e.g. Macbeth, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen) were written by other writers, and there are some plays which some people claim to have been written by Shakespeare and other people think not (e.g. Edward III, The Second Maiden's Tragedy). Romeo and Juliet does not fall into either of these categories. The only people who would think that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet are those crazies that imagine that Shakespeare never wrote anything, but that all of his works were really written by someone else and a huge conspiracy was developed to make it look like Shakespeare wrote them. The usual reason for thinking this is that Shakespeare was unquestionably a middle-class, high-school educated white man, and some people are uncomfortable with this being a description of the greatest writer ever to write in English, so they imagine that the real writer was someone more noble, more educated, more black or more female than Shakespeare was.