Why do scholars think Shakespeare might not have written his plays?

Answer 1

Some people believe that Shakespeare didn't write his plays because he didn't have a proper education, (he only went to school for two years.) ,he didn't travel to any of the countries he wrote about, and he had no way of knowing the details of how the royal court was run that he described in his plays. They believe that the plays were actually written by a nobleman who did not take credit for his work, because some of the plays were highly political and mocked royalty at times. A noble could have been executed if he had written plays like Shakespeare's. The most likely person who could have written the plays (if he didn't) would be Sir Edward De Vere.

Answer 2

It's not because there is any real doubt about the question. The evidence of Shakespeare's authorship is very strong. It's because, for one reason or another, they want the author of the plays to be a certain kind of person, and the William Shakespeare we know doesn't fit their ideas of what he should have been like. So they imagine other people as the author.

Some people imagine that Shakespeare should have been a well-educated man, a university man or great scholar. Sometimes that is so they can try to hunt down obscure allusions in the plays (always a fun activity for literary academics) without wondering whether Shakespeare may not have read the book in question. Sometimes it's just because they are academics and their self-esteem is hurt by the idea that England's greatest author was realatively uneducated. So far better if the plays were written by Christopher Marlowe, a university man, or Francis Bacon, a genuine scholar and extremely tedious writer.

Others are offended by the notion that England's greatest author was a country bumpkin, a middle-class man without any connections to the great people of the time. So far better if the plays were really written by the hack writer the Earl of Oxford or someone like him.

More recently there has surfaced the desire that England's greatest writer should be female, so naturally the suggestion is that the plays were written by Queen Elizabeth or some other notorious female person of the day.

As well, the rise of criticism which likes to link literature to events in the author's life has made some academics long for someone with a better-documented biography than Mr. S of Stratford.

All of this is wishful thinking, almost like fanfiction. Like it or not, William Shakespeare, a grammar school educated son of a country glover who appears to have spent his entire life in England, and whose life is free of dramatic incident, as far as we know it, is the guy who wrote the plays.

(alternative answer) I do know of one curious piece of evidence that casts doubt upon Shakespeare's authorship of the material that is attributed to him. There is only one document which we can legally confirm to have been written by William Shakespeare, and that is his last will and testament, which strangely enough is rather badly written. This is somewhat inexplicable if indeed it was written by the greatest writer of all time in the English language. However, we may still speculate that there was some reason why he was not up to his usual standard when he wrote his will. Perhaps he was drunk at the time. And his lack of formal education does raise the question of how he became educated enough (in an age well before the introduction of public libraries) to write such erudite material. So, there is at least some reason to wonder if Shakespeare was really the author of the poems and plays which bear his illustrious name. We may never know for certain.

Answer 3

The reasons they give include:

-He lacked a college education.

-Shakespeare of Stratford could not have known the customs and manner of the upper class.

- He spelled his name differently on different occasions.

But the real reason people think Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare is because they don't want him to have written it. For some reason, that balding, portly, bourgeois, high-school educated man who never gave out any indications of his private life does not fit their idea of the greatest playwright of all time. However, since the actual evidence that the great playwright was in fact that balding bourgeois man from Stratford is overwhelming, they have to make up bogus "facts" (like the assertion that Shakespeare was not in London when the plays were written when he obviously was) in order to give them some reasons for disbelieving it.

Answer 4

Shakespeare wrote his plays to be watched, not read. If a couple of thousand people showed up at the theatre to watch a Shakespeare play, the revenue could pay a lot of bills for Shakespeare and his business partners. The public liked new material, and they didn't want any other playing companies to get it. Furthermore, if the play was popular, they did not want the other companies to make money off of its popularity.

For all these reasons, Shakespeare and his partners did not want to hand out copies of the script to anyone who could pay for them. They did not even give the whole script to the actors hired by their own company for fear that they would sell it to a rival company.

Even so, the hired actors did sometimes sell their part together with what they could remember of the other parts. Sometimes audience members with particularly good memories were planted so they could reconstruct the play later. These copies of plays if they were popular sometimes made it into print. This is how, we think, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet first made it into print. When that happened, the company would issue an "official" copy. If the play had to be in print, at least Shakespeare's company would profit from it.

Please note, I said "Shakespeare's company" not "Shakespeare". The most important reason that Shakespeare didn't publish his plays is that he didn't own them. They belonged to The King's Men. Even after his death it was his partners Heminges and Condell who published the First Folio, not his heirs John and Susannah Hall. Shakespeare had no right to publish his plays.

Answer 5

Some people are troubled by certain facts about Shakespeare: that he seems to have had wide knowledge and yet was not a University man, he seems to have had some familiarity with court procedure but was not an aristocrat, he must have been very well-read yet owned no books (not so as to bequeath them anyway). Although we have more personal information about Shakespeare than about some of his contemporary writers, some people are troubled by the fact that we have no letters to or from him, and very little information about his personal life.

These people wish to resolve their troubles by imagining that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his works. In order to do so, they have to forget about the cumulative effect of following facts:

1. William Shakespeare was a real person who demonstratively was born, married, owned property, fathered children and died in Stratford.

2. William Shakespeare was demonstratively a member of the theatre company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and which included Richard Burbage, Henry Condell and John Heminges.

3. The Stratford William Shakespeare left money in his will to Burbage, Heminges and Condell, and was clearly the same person as the actor.

4. Plays and poetry were published under the name of William Shakespeare many times during his lifetime, and the poet and playwright were clearly the same man (Excerpts from one of the plays and two sonnets were published together in the unauthorized collection The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599).

5. Once the actor William Shakespeare joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the plays written by William Shakespeare were only performed by The Lord Chamberlain's Men.

5. The plays, including those which had already been published during his lifetime were published by the same Heminges and Condell referred to in Shakespeare's will, with their endorsement that he was the author, in 1623.

Answer 6

Some people would be happier is someone other than Shakespeare wrote his plays. Usually this is because they have the idea that in order for someone to have written such extraordinary works, he must have been an obviously extraordinary man. And William Shakespeare was a very ordinary sort of man from what we know of him. Therefore such people love to fantasize that some other more extraordinary person wrote his works. Also, some people believe that you cannot understand a literary work without an intimate understanding of the author. To such people the fact that we know practically nothing about William Shakespeare's likes, dislikes, feelings or beliefs must be a great frustration, one which would make them want to believe that some more accessible person was the author.

To any one who is not influenced by emotional factors like these it is quite clear that there is plenty of evidence that Shakespeare was the author of Shakespeare, and no evidence at all that anyone else one was.

Answer 7

No actual scholars believe that the plays as a whole were written by anyone but Shakespeare, but many think that some of them were collaborations. Collaborations between playwrights were very common in Shakespeare's day--actually more common than having someone write a play entirely on his own. Apprentice playwrights got their start by writing one scene or a section of dialogue for a play by an established playwright.

Some think that Shakespeare had help from George Peele for his early plays, especially Titus Andronicus. The copy of Macbeth that has come down to us appears to have been adapted by Thomas Middleton by adding the character of Hecate and some silly witch songs. A number of the later plays are thought to be collaborations with John Fletcher, who replaced Shakespeare as the house playwright for the King's Men after Shakespeare retired. Henry VIII and Pericles in particular are thought to be partly Fletcher, and The Two Noble Kinsman says on its title page that it is by "Shakespeare and Fletcher".

Answer 8

No actual scholars believe that anyone apart from Shakespeare wrote his plays except as collaborators with Shakespeare. The people that think that someone other than Shakespeare was the writer we know of as Shakespeare are in the same category as people who believe that the world is 7000 years old, that the Apollo moon landings were faked, and that world leaders have been replaced by reptilian aliens who can take the shape of people.

Answer 9

He didn't own the right to publish them. He wrote them for his acting company and they, not he, could and did publish them both before and after his death.