The historical records concerning William Shakespeare’s life reveal many strange paradoxes. While the records from the theatrical world in London show that he worked as an actor and playwright, the contemporary documentation from Stratford-upon-Avon reveals no theatrical or literary interests of any kind. No record exists of Shakespeare receiving an education, buying a single book or writing poems or plays. Over the years this enigma has led to speculation that Shakespeare was not the author of the plays attributed to him. Various candidates have been proposed as the “real” author, such as the English statesman Francis Bacon and the earls of Oxford and Derby, whom it has been speculated used Shakespeare as a frontman as they wished for various reasons to remain anonymous. The only problem with this theory is that it makes no sense. Why pick a frontman who seems to have had no literary connections - at least none that he advertised in Stratford-upon-Avon? In this fascinating interview: Was William Shakespeare actually Christopher Marlowe? - 10:08 Was William Shakespeare a homosexual? - 28:50 Was William Shakespeare famous during his time? - 42:24 The Lost Plays of Christopher Marlowe - 54:11
It's really not so hard to understand when you consider that he spent 90% of his adult life in London. The evidence for this is as follows: Aside from his birth, marriage and death, the only adult mentions we have placing him firmly in a geographic location place him in London, and there are many of those. Richard Quiney sent him a letter while in London. He dodged a tax bill in London. He participated in marriage negotiations in London. He bought a house in London. The transaction for which was handled by fellow King's Man John Hemminges. He was actually present to sign the deed. We don't have any evidence that he did that for New Place. When he purchased a cottage across the street from New Place, his brother handled the paperwork, but the court put the transaction on hold until Shakespeare showed in person. His son-in-law never mentions him in his physick book. Shakespeare would undoubtedly have been his patient had he been around. All of his Stratford suits and transactions were handled by lawyers. Of the three certain signatures besides his will, none are from Stratford. He was an actor in London. Some actors today are said to "phone it in", but in Shakespeare's day, you had to be physically present to act. His brother was also an actor, and had a child there and died there. The only really notable thing the Adult Shakespeare did in Stratford was die, which is why the best evidence that we have that Shakespeare of Stratford was a poet is his funerary monument.
I'm not interested in wild conspiracy theories. But it seems to me that anyone claiming that any one particular person wrote this work, would have to prove their theories. The burden of proof lies on whoever is making that claim. That means actual verifiable evidence. I don't see anyone that can produce definitive proof who wrote them. And the ones that claim "the man from Stratford " is the writer have the weakest argument. Even if circumstantial evidence is the standard they still have the weakest argument. I believe if either Bacon or Devier, had been named the writer seven or even ten years after their death I don't think nearly as many people would doubt they were the actual writers.
Check out Alexander Waugh here on TH-cam! He removes the carpet underneath from all the bollocks being said here..! Shaksper of Stratford was NOT Shakespeare!
yes they also teach Shakespeare in the British Caribbean, I had to read Macbeth in the 11th grade in Jamaica. Shakespeare could also have been very heavily inspired by Marlowe that his plays sounded like his, then after a while he developed his own individuality. There are so many possibilities to the history of this dude since we hardly know anything about him.
So someone wanted to see these plays produced and acted for the general public. They wished to remain anonymous. They had a third party pass the manuscript off to Shaksper on the condition that he claim authorship. This arrangement worked out well enough to be repeated, even after the playwright and Shaksper both had died. The true playwright was likely of noble birth considering the level of education necessary to write the plays. Until the heirs of that noble house choose to produce documentation, all we can do is guess. Will Graham suss it out? Maybe.
"He's run out on a debt of five shillings." It was 1597, not 1593, and it was a tax bill from St. Helen's Bishopgate, not rent. As he was already a householder in Stratford and probably had moved out of St. Helen's by the time the tax was recorded, it's unknown if he even owed it. St. Helen's Bishopgate was not, as the guest claims, a slum. It was one of the better areas of the city, with a number of prosperous residents.
"Mum's the word," probably refers to to Sir Francis Bacon, who was recently discovered by Jacob Roberts' decryption of the Shakespeare funerary plaque in Stratford-upon-Avon to be Shakespeare. It was an Autobiography of Bacon, who revealed that he was the legitimate son of Mary Queen of Scots and King Francis II (who died before Bacon's birth,) making him King Francis III. He was the older half-brother of James VI/I, making him heir of Elizabeth I of England also. Catherine de Medici tried to poison baby Francis and was furious to learn that he hadn't died. Mary appealed to her cousin Elizabeth, who agreed to let Mary return to Scotland, but baby Francis had to be placed with her Lady-in-waiting and her Keeper of the Great Seal, under Elizabeth 's close watch. Bacon felt betrayed by Mary, who lost him his birthright. The entire story comes back to the secret of his Mum.
There is one record of Shakespeare suing a local tavern keeper for payment of malt sold to him on credit. This was well into Shakespeare's career as a poet and after he purchased 107 acres of ag land in Stratford. There are no other records which would indicate selling grain was a business. There is no record of him lending money. Only one for selling grain on credit.
"These purchases start from the age of 30." Shakespeare was 32 when he bought his house in Stratford. He was 39 when he first bought land, a decade after he was first identified as a poet.
The pen name, "Shakespeare" and the person, Shakspere, are two different things. They get connected after 1623 but Shakspere is still not "identified as a poet" since the sonnets are not in the 1623 folio. A 1599 collection of poems included works by Thomas Heywood who complained to the printer, Jaggard. Heywood complains but Shakspere never does. Never gets paid to write. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passionate_Pilgrim
@@apollocobain8363 A vast number of contemporaries identified William Shakespeare the poet as the gentleman, and actor from Stratford, both during his life and immediately after. I've shown you the evidence before so now you are repeating blatant lies. And Heywood says the author, in the third person, complained. He does not say that he, himself did. After that Shakespeare's name was removed from the rest of the print run. Q.E.D.
@@Jeffhowardmeade No one during Stratford Shakspere's life refers to HIM as a poet or a writer. A bit-part actor yes. A 1/8 shareholder in the Globe yes but a writer of any kind no. "Honey-tongued" refers to the writing itself; not to being in the presence of a writer named Shakespeare. "Passionate Pilgrim is first printed by Jaggard in 1598 or 1599 and the title page says "by W. Shakespeare". The second edition in 1599 changes only the seller; to stationer William Leake who had bought the rights to "Venus and Adonis" (those rights were not purchased from Stratford Shakspere of course). The third printing is an expanded edition in 1612 and this is the print run that Heywood complains about with no result. Heywood refers to another person as "the author" -- he does not say "Shakspere" or Shakespeare or any other version of the name because he is referring to one of the real people who works Jaggard had printed and attributed falsely to the pen name "W. Shakespeare." Heywood could be referring to any one of the following real people whose writings were published by Jaggard under the name W. Shakespeare: Richard Barnfield, Bartholomew Griffin, Thomas Deloney, Christopher Marlowe, Walter Raleigh or the still unknown authors of the remaining 10 sonnets. It is therefore not disputed by reasonable persons that 1) Jaggard used the name "W. Shakespeare" when printing works which were written by a wide variety of people none of whom were actually named Shakespeare, and 2) no one named Shakespeare complained or sought action to stop the works of others from being published under that name.
@@apollocobain8363 Just curious, but are you physically capable of admitting that you're wrong? Because I'll gladly inundate you with evidence that you're wrong if you'll promise to admit the fact.
Why did he keep getting into trouble with the law in London? Not the action of a spy drawing attention to himself. As for Shakey directing a team who wrote the plays. This is probably true. It is currently thought that Homer too was simply a name of several poets who wrote "his" works.
Shakespeare used about 19,000 words, which only turns into 30,000 if you consider horse and horses and murder and murther different words. He was about average for poets of the era. The average person today does not have a vocabulary of only 2,000 words. Don't believe me? Open a dictionary and start reading and see how many of the words you don't know. The Merriam-Webster pocket edition has 75,000 words in it. The first Latin-English translation dictionary was produced in 1538. The first English-only dictionary, complete with definitions, in 1604. It doesn't really matter because very little of a typical person's vocabulary is learned from dictionaries.
I've never heard anybody suggest that perhaps Shakespeare was a savant. There are savants studied today who baffle the minds of doctors, psychologists, neurologists, etc. What if his IQ was off then charts, had an unbelievable memory, could read a book in an hour, etc? Perhaps he was taken advantage of by using his plays and not paying him properly. I'm just throwing it out there.
Christopher Marlowe was an alias, and he didn't die. He was a spy and his death was staged. Interesting that the Privy Council stepped in when Cambridge was refusing to give him a graduation certificate, believing he was an atheist. They convinced the school that he was a great help to the country, and they gave it to him. If you look carefully at the portrait found in 1950s at Cambridge in a pile of wood that was attached to a heater in his former dorm room, it is relatively easy to decrypt, even I was able to do it. Hint- don't take dates to be correct on paintings from that time. The portrait was of another very famous person, who used the Marlowe alias, and was painted by Bacon, who was also a spy and a painter, engraver and a mapmaker, and used many aliases, including Shakespeare.
We have Dugdale's original sketch of the Shakespeare Funerary Monument. It's not very good and it's not hard to see how the engraver for the book got so many things wrong. The sketch nonetheless shows the figure wearing the scholar's subfusc and with his hands resting on a tassled pillow. Dugdale's notes includes the inscription comparing Shakespeare to the Roman poet Virgil. Aside from some well-documented repairs made over the centuries, the monument appears just as it did by its first attested appearance, and matches many other similar monuments from the era, all dedicated to learned men, none to tradesmen or merchants. "The record shows that that wasn't put there until 1744 by a theatrical agent..." There is no record of this at all. The first person to record the monument did so in about 1618. He was a fellow poet from London named John Weever. He transcribed the monument and identified it as "Willm Shakspeare the famous poet."
Most of the introduction is true, as I know it. What is very doubtful is that his name was known throughout England, and that he was immortalized in his lifetime. In contrast, after his death, his plays become LESS performed, less than Johnson's plays. His plays went out of fashion as Ford and other Jacobean writers became more well liked. Shakespeare's immortality, prophesized by Ben Johnson, did not come until centuries later. It was the actors that were well known back then, not the writers. Like today. Can you name the writer of your favorite TV show or movie?
They were still reprinting Venus and Adonis at the time of his death. I think they were on the 12th edition, or something. He wasn't completely forgotten, but he wasn't the rock star he is today. I doubt there was anyone living in Cornwall who had ever read any poem, let alone one of his, so he was probably not known throughout England. Not completely.
Caius Martius Coriolanus What is the estimated percentage of literacy in England at that time? I suspect that When William visited Stratford, and somebody would ask, "Who is that", the answer would not be, "The famous poet William Shakespeare", but "John Shakespeare's son, William."
Zenaida Robbins The King's School was chartered before Shakespeare's birth, but it had been around for a while before that. In a town of 2000 people of all ages, a school which could accommodate 50 of them at a time would likely have educated at least half of the male population. Even women were educated at petty schools (a London prostitute referred to a Stratford woman as a former classmate in a court deposition). But being able to read and reading are two very different things. However he was viewed, a monument to Shakespeare the poet was erected in Holy Trinity Church. That would be rather pearls before swine if the townsfolk had no appreciation of who he was.
Caius Martius Coriolanus Right. We DO have the records of every Oxford don who taught at the Edward VI school, and how much they were paid, the years they taught, and where they lived. Boys AND girls went to petit school to learn to read and write English. To enter grammar scool the child had to demonstrate that he could read and write English. It was not taught there. Where did you get the stuff about the prostitue?? GREAT!!!!
JOHN FLORIO was the only one who got the knoledge, the patronages and books to write all the Shakespeare's works. Pay attention to all the italian literarian and geographical references!
Do you mean the Italian references where he got nearly everything wrong? How does a guy like Florio accidentally put Padua in Lombardy when it was in Veneto? How does he not know there are no tides in the Mediterranean? How does he not know that Venice is a republic?
i couldn't get past all of phillips' ridiculous, ignorant blunders about the monument and the 'dugdale drawing.' did the interviewer do any research on this guy's 'work' (or, more importantly, its refutation)?
+Chris Hanks You made it further than I did. I couldn't get past the assertion that an Elizabethan grammar school was dedicated to "reading, writing and arithmetic."
The plays were Italian, they already existed. He just made the characters more realistic. He only wrote one or two plays of his own and he would only have had to have known a little bit of Greek and Latin, which he was probably taught at school.
Interesting - fascinating even - yet not sure if the easier explanation would not just be that the Stratford upon Avon Will and the London Will are in fact two people - one a merchant - the other a spy and actor/playwright.
@@Jeffhowardmeade His will looks like it was written by someone unaccustomed to writing, a poorly educated man at best. Maybe Walsingham wrote the plays to keep the spy ring going with help from dead Marlowe's unfinished scripts.
@@MrAbzu That's funny, because his will was written by a professional law clerk. People then as now hire lawyers to write their wills. It's written in a script called "Secretary Hand" which was common at the time but is illegible to most people now. If one can read Secretary Hand, his will and his signatures are perfectly legible. And I'll stack up scores of contemporaries who identified Shakespeare as a poet against your suppositions all day long.
@@Jeffhowardmeade Point taken, and I bet they can produce these poems written in his hand. Not only does he lack the education but even more glaringly, he lacks the personality. Maybe you should tell us how a skinflint and a cad wrote the plays and poems. You can convince me he wrote the plays if you exhume the body and find a chip in his head, you know, like Napoleon.
@@MrAbzu I'm sorry. I feel strange debating with a special person. I'll let the copious evidence speak for itself from here on out. The Folger Shakespeare Library has it all available in high resolution scans.
Stratford was a village just north east of London. Stratford upon Avon is a town further away. Two different Stratford's, why not two different Shakespeare's? The only real question is, did they both have the same name or was the writer an alias?
@@Jeffhowardmeade Well at least Sir Francis Bacon could write a legible William Shakespeare, many times over it would seem. It may be time for more monument makeovers. A hat, beard and mustache should do it. Enjoy. th-cam.com/video/QDn8gdBqnIM/w-d-xo.html
4:00 He also needs to have been someone who lived in Italy for an extended period. See: 'The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard's Unknown Travels' 47:00 No one knows when the plays were written! Why do so many people make this blatantly fallacious assumption? Is it more likely the plays were written over a longer period of time and then released or that they were all composed in 8 weeks or by 'assembly line'?
The plays are peppered with contemporary allusions which date them. Others either rely on sources and/or are the source for other works, giving them reliable earliest and latest possible days for composition.
The Shakespeare Guide to Italy shows that Marlowe exiled himself to Italy. The dates are not revised in the Marlovian account, except that some plays could be composed between 1616 and 1623, the "latest possible date" is more relaxed if you don't care about Shakespeare's life.
The Shakespeare Guide to Italy shows nothing of the sort. It shows that some of the things found in the Italian plays could be found in Italy, though like most Anti-Strat efforts, it involves seriously stretching the facts. The sycamore grove mentioned in R&J, for example, are not still found in Verona. Another species of tree planted after the war can be found there, however. This proves nothing at all about Marlowe. In any case, if any of the works were written post 1616, it would be really stoopid to include them in a book you were purporting to be written by a guy who died in 1616.
Nonsense. The Shakespeare Guide to Italy shows the canal travel depicted in the scenes in Milan and Verona are accurate, that ALL the details, including the names of churches and obscure local references, are accurate, and it includes things like "Get thee to St. Gregory's Well" which are ejaculations which you COULDN'T POSSIBLY KNOW ABOUT without being there, as St. Gregory's well is a local tradition referring to a plague pit. LIkewise for the "Duke's Oak" of Midsummer's Night Dream (not an oak). Likewise for the "Emperor" in Milan (the Holy Roman Emperor stayed in Milan for two years, not only justifying the "Emperor" reference, but also dating the time depicted in the play precisely). There is no chance in Hell that Marlowe was not in Italy, and following the exact canal paths depicted in the plays (some of which are quite obscure). There is no stretching in the Shakespeare Guide, and the only dubious chapter is on the identification of Prospero's Island, as it is possible that "Caliban" and "Ariel" are borrowings from Shakespeare into the local dialect, rather than the other way around, as Roe argues. It requires a deeper investigation into the dialect history to be sure of this, so this is the only piece of evidence which is weak. The rest is sure and solid. It is especially striking in its analysis of Venice, which shows the locations for Merchant, to contrast with the stupid comments by mainstream scholars of "Why doesn't Shakespeare talk about Gondolas and flooded parts?", which ignore that this part of Venice is dry. It is the scholars who get everything wrong about Italy, not Shakespeare. The Italian influence in the plays includes latin-language source material not translated and Commedia-del-Arte, both of which are not available in England. You are wrong. The collection probably includes plays written after 1616, and published in the Folio for the first time. It does no damage to include them in the Folio, as nobody knows when they were written. Half the first-folio doesn't come with any dating or performance data. Shakespeare doesn't need to be alive to be credited, he is acting as a front for Marlowe, much as Ian Hunter fronted for Trumbo under similar political persecution in the 1950s. It is also possible that Marlowe died in 1613. I don't know. But I tend to believe he died around 1620, and the final unfinished manuscripts are the Shakespeare "collaborations" from the last years (they were completed postumously by the collaborators without ever meeting Marlowe). But it doesn't matter how it happened. The works were written by Marlowe, as is clear from the stylometric data, and they were written in Italy, as is clear from internal evidence. This is firmly established, and denying it makes you a know-nothing.
As opposed to someone who knows everything, including things which are false. The stylometric data is clear that Marlowe was NOT Shakespeare. Commedia-dell'arte was well-known in England, as it had been around for a long time. Shakespeare's first clown, Will Kempe, had traveled all over Europe and Italian acting companies had done the same by Shakespeare's era. It doesn't show up in Shakespeare's work until later, when it started to make its mark in England, which makes one wonder where it was in all those Italian plays Marlowe wrote before The Tempest. But just to seal the deal, ask yourself "How do I know all these details about Italy, since I've never been there?" Obviously you don't know anything about Italy, because nobody could ever learn a damned thing about Italy from a book, or being told about it by someone else.
John Heminges, Henry Condell, and Richard Burbage, three actors of The Lord Chamberlain's Men, a famous acting company that included William Shakespeare, were given money by William Shakespeare of Stratford in his Last Will and Testament in 1616. Two of these actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were responsible for having 36 of Shakespeare's plays published in the First Folio in 1623. Ben Jonson's eulogy in the First Folio clearly praises Shakespeare as a great writer. He states that "thy writings to be such, /As neither Man, nor Muse, can praise too much." Heminges and Condell also praise Shakespeare as a writer, stating that "he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our province, who onely gather his works, and give them you, to praise him." These are "his works" and "his papers" that they are publishing. He is clearly presented as the writer of these works in the First Folio. The Last Will and Testament of William Shakespeare of Stratford clearly connects him with the 1623 First Folio through Heminges and Condell and it is clear that Shakespeare is presented as the author of the plays.
His wife. A shepherd indicated in his will that "Anne Shaxpere wyfe unto Mr Wyllyam Shaxpere" had 40 shillings of his. Whether an old debt (the shepherd once worked for her father), a new one, or money he had left for safekeeping with her, it shows that she was capable of handing things on her own.
@@MrAbzu It's not my task to defend the business acumen of Shakespeare's wife from assholes. But if you really wanted to know (though it's clear you really don't), Shakespeare's brother Gilbert (1566-1612) also handled matters on his brother's behalf, including going to court for a real estate transaction. His father, once a mayor and justice of the peace, was living there, and his mother who was once made executor of her father's will, was also still present. Finally, we know he had a lawyer as a tenant in New Place for some time. Are you now satisfied that there were plenty of people back in Stratford who were capable of handling matters for Shakespeare? Or are you just an asshole?
Have you tried J T Looney? His book has been wrongly bad-mouthed for a century now. The very fact of its successful censorship over this time, and yet the magnetic force of his arguments the strength of which have swayed the minds of our greatest thinkers leaves a very embarrassing taste in one's mouth regarding the Stratfordian scholarship. But you can't do it without reading Shakespeare in context of the Looney argument. My advice to anyone is to read Looney with Shakespeare.
The shares reverted to the remaining members when a sharer died or retired. In 1607 William Sly died, and his 1/7 share reverted to the others, who then gave it to William Ostler. When Ostler died in 1614, his widow sued to keep her late husband's share. It's unknown how the case was resolved, but it shows the standard practice. A sharer was one who contributed to the operation of the company, not merely a stock holder.
Ask his wife! If one would propose this task & research what the wife's reply would be then William Shakespeare is AKA or a pseudonym. P.S. Just place the correct answer on the test & you'll do okay. After all it's part of the greatness of England. Love Tourism!
So a well off Shakespeare needs a patron in London? Does not quite add up, sounds like two different people with the same name. The tax records seem to indicate that the patron thing did not work out too well.
The tax rolls don't tell us anything of the sort. There is nothing which can be inferred about the tax except that Shakespeare, who had become a householder in Stratford and paid taxes there, had not paid it.
@@Jeffhowardmeade It was on a different document and was included as part of the story. I do a better job of remembering what I read than where I read it so you can find it for yourself. I cannot imagine how this tidbit slipped by you.
@@MrAbzu I'm familiar with all the evidence that exists regarding Shakespeare. There are two documents regarding Shakespeare and taxes, both from the parish of St. Helens Bishopgate. One from 1597 says Shakespeare owes 5s on a putative wealth of £5, and the next year another says he owes 13s 4d, and still hasn't paid. Though there is no explanation as to how an individuals wealth was calculated, £5 is about average for the personal property owned by someone then dwelling in rented rooms. As other documents indicate that he had already bought New Place and was therefore a householder in Stratford, and may have already moved to Southwark (you already know more about the Langley Writ than actually exists in it), there are debates as to whether he actually owed it. We don't know if it was settled or if the parish simply wrote it off. He doesn't appear in the 1600 records. Venus and Adonis was published at a time when the theaters were closed, drying up a substantial source of Shakespeare's income, perhaps his only source. Only a year earlier Shakespeare's father was noted as one who didn't come to church for fear of "processe for debte". The purchase of New Place in 1596 followed two popular works dedicated to a wealthy patron, the reopened theaters, and evidence of royal patronage for his company. Shakespeare's fortunes by 1596 were on the rise. It is entirely possible that the tax-defalting William Shakespeare was a different man of the same name, as it is nearly the only record of a William Shakespeare without context indicating he's a gentleman or in some way attached to the theater. The fact that this other William Shakespeare appears and then disappears entirely from the record without benefit of a local birth or burial suggests it is likely the same man. But hey, very nice of you to try to exonerate our beloved Bard from allegations of tax dodging. 😀
@@MrAbzu I've now listened to about half of this and the guest is just making stuff up. If you think this is a reliable source, then I hope someone less gullible handles your money for you.
@@Jeffhowardmeade That is how everyone writes a book about Shakespeare, they make things up because no one knows anything. At least he tried to hide Shakespeare's criminal pursuits behind a theory of him being a spy for Walsingham, which may explain his modest rap sheet. Lets see, he spent a couple hundred pounds in Stratford for a house and land, a hundred and forty pounds for a house in London, he purchased a coat of arms for his father and shares in two theater companies. Country bumpkins did not come by that kind of money honestly back then. The plays up front were the loss leader while the real money was made out back.
+Matthew Stull When exactly did he find time to write almost 50 plays for the London theater for specific actors that are mentioned in the plays when he spent so much time in Paris, in writing his own ponderous tomes and his normal royal duties?
during and after always writing, dude.....he was francis bacon....his ponderous tomes came out later...you've got some catching up to do hahhaha. you can start by turning your brayne on !!! wwwwooooooooossssshhhh
Yeh, that would be a great theory except that when you look at the plays it's just not true. It was a performance of Richard II that was used as a trigger for the Essex rebellion ffs. Only in Richard III is the writer forced to take sides between Tudor and Plantagenet, and nobody was going to be dumb enough to suggest that the Tudors were usurpers.
This is a fascinating interview. Obviously, there is more to Shakespeare than the traditional view. But how is it that the collaborative productions up until Shakespeare became involved were just OK (popular in their time, probably because the stories were well-known or archetypal, and gave the great actors like Burbage their chance to strut and fret) but are now largely ignored, whereas the Shakespeare collaborations, after a couple of false starts, quickly assumed the status of towering works of genius, still relevant and essential today? One could say Shakespeare was The Beatles to Marlowe's Herman's Hermits.
Clifford Hughes It also depends on taste of the era. Henry VIII and Timon of Athens were pretty popular and produced a lot in the 19th century but in the 20th stopped being produced. Today some more obscure works are more widely done when they weren't before so part of it could be tastes change.
The average person does not have a vocabulary of only 2,000 words, and Shakespeare only had a vocabulary of 30,000 words if you consider "horse" to be a different word from "horses".
The first translation dictionaries were produced before Shakespeare was born. The first word lists were printed when Shakespeare was a young man. The first dictionary to include definitions was printed in 1604.
+Jay Bee There is a ton of evidence. I would go to the trouble of spelling it out for you yet again, but you will promptly ignore it and default back to your uninformed opinion and make the same claims later.
guilielmus Wilhelm guillaume guglielmo guillero guillelmo liam gwillym for fem see Wilhelmina dims elma Wilma wilmett wilmot mina Minnie minella lacrimation washed windowoanes Charles Darwin thrives healthily among us and girolano Savonarola is not so much as dust. romeo and Juliette [ij] marlow moon astrolabes crossing the atlantic captains log. Men of letter symmetry st range order and chaos arrange snake tree. angel/angle admiral ship bow figurehead fall for a woman Shakespeare i'am cool. roger starbuck I love I love my calendar girl each and every day of the y-ear. hippy hippy shake ship ahoy
Probably not true. Shakespeare was an actor in a company which played Marlowe's plays. Recent stylometry shows that Marlowe probably wrote a few scenes in a play attributed to Shakespeare (one of the Henry VI plays, I think). Shakespeare's early work often seems to be a conscious immitation of Marlowe. Green was addressing Marlowe in his Groat's Worth of Wit, and complaining about Shakespeare as if Marlowe should know who that is. The theater scene was not a large one. While there is no proof, I think it highly unlikely that they never met.
Stylometry shows that the Shakespeare plays were all written by Marlowe. But since Marlowe evolved so quickly, if you insist on finding micro-separators, you can divide Marlowe into "Very Early Marlowe" (Marlowe's work) "Middle Marlowe" (Early Shakespeare) and "Mature Marlowe" (Late Shakespeare). The reason Henry VI is now "coauthored by Marlowe" is just that Henry VI parts 1,2,3 are the earliest plays in Shakespeare's folio. They were written in the late 1580s or in 1590, at the same time as the other undenied Marlowe works. So the identity with Marlowe is obvious because it is the same person at the same time. But all the plays in the First Folio were written by Marlowe, just some were written much later, under Italian influence, with more maturity, and more comedy, so the academics are too stupid to realize it yet. But it is still obviously the same writer as for Henry VI.
Yeah, believe what you want. The fact that a few scenes of Henry IV match Marlowe's style and the rest don't in the same play is because he didn't write it all. The reason "Early Marlowe" isn't the same as "Middle Marlowe" is because there was no "Middle Marlowe". He was dead. Shakespeare wasn't, and started writing about then, probably after having performed in plays by Marlowe.
Caius Martius Coriolanus You are talking nonsense. I just watched a performance of Richard II, and it is obviously by Marlowe from beginning to end, with echoes of all the previous plays, including Marlowe's favorite word "Jade", and a whole riff on "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?" (it's the king staring at the mirror, and wondering why his face is still so unlined). This stuff was written by Marlowe, and it is all in his style, and all you need is a computer and some statistics to demonstrate it.
And yet when High Craig and Arthur Kinney did exactly that, they determined that Henry VI was by several different authors, and that the rest of Shakespeare had no overlap with Marlowe at all. You see what you want to see. The vast body of Shakespeare scholarship sees something else.
A complete crock. For instance: he needed a university education. Bob Dylan didn't make it through a year of university and he's extremely widely read, as many autodidacts are. Then there's the Catholic/Prot controversy, which is clearly built into both the plays and the society of the Elizabethan and then Stuart England.
Where would he have had access to that information? It's easier to be an autodidact in the 21st century. In the Elizabethan era access to information was not commonplace.
@@RussellScottHD St. Paul's Churchyard, for one. There was a thriving bookselling business there. Shakespeare, wealthy by the standards of the day, could have purchased any book he needed. But he didn't need to buy them. It turns out that the printer who published everything Shakespeare wrote specifically for publication was a fellow Stratfordian named Richard Field. Will and Richard grew up in the same neighborhood and later in his career Shakespeare gave Richard a shout-out in Cymbeline. Why this is important is because Richard Field also printed an astonishingly high number of Shakespeare's sources. What are the odds?
@@BullittblThe plays? No. His fellow actors claimed he did, as well as everyone who put his name on one they published. He claimed authorship of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which are poems, not plays.
The historical records concerning William Shakespeare’s life reveal many strange paradoxes. While the records from the theatrical world in London show that he worked as an actor and playwright, the contemporary documentation from Stratford-upon-Avon reveals no theatrical or literary interests of any kind. No record exists of Shakespeare receiving an education, buying a single book or writing poems or plays. Over the years this enigma has led to speculation that Shakespeare was not the author of the plays attributed to him. Various candidates have been proposed as the “real” author, such as the English statesman Francis Bacon and the earls of Oxford and Derby, whom it has been speculated used Shakespeare as a frontman as they wished for various reasons to remain anonymous. The only problem with this theory is that it makes no sense. Why pick a frontman who seems to have had no literary connections - at least none that he advertised in Stratford-upon-Avon?
In this fascinating interview:
Was William Shakespeare actually Christopher Marlowe? - 10:08
Was William Shakespeare a homosexual? - 28:50
Was William Shakespeare famous during his time? - 42:24
The Lost Plays of Christopher Marlowe - 54:11
Russell Scott So sorry you have a similar name to a Stratfordian blagger, so sorry.
It's really not so hard to understand when you consider that he spent 90% of his adult life in London. The evidence for this is as follows:
Aside from his birth, marriage and death, the only adult mentions we have placing him firmly in a geographic location place him in London, and there are many of those.
Richard Quiney sent him a letter while in London.
He dodged a tax bill in London.
He participated in marriage negotiations in London.
He bought a house in London. The transaction for which was handled by fellow King's Man John Hemminges. He was actually present to sign the deed. We don't have any evidence that he did that for New Place.
When he purchased a cottage across the street from New Place, his brother handled the paperwork, but the court put the transaction on hold until Shakespeare showed in person.
His son-in-law never mentions him in his physick book. Shakespeare would undoubtedly have been his patient had he been around.
All of his Stratford suits and transactions were handled by lawyers. Of the three certain signatures besides his will, none are from Stratford.
He was an actor in London. Some actors today are said to "phone it in", but in Shakespeare's day, you had to be physically present to act. His brother was also an actor, and had a child there and died there.
The only really notable thing the Adult Shakespeare did in Stratford was die, which is why the best evidence that we have that Shakespeare of Stratford was a poet is his funerary monument.
I'm not interested in wild conspiracy theories. But it seems to me that anyone claiming that any one particular person wrote this work, would have to prove their theories. The burden of proof lies on whoever is making that claim. That means actual verifiable evidence. I don't see anyone that can produce definitive proof who wrote them. And the ones that claim "the man from Stratford " is the writer have the weakest argument.
Even if circumstantial evidence is the standard they still have the weakest argument. I believe if either Bacon or Devier, had been named the writer seven or even ten years after their death I don't think nearly as many people would doubt they were the actual writers.
Check out Alexander Waugh here on TH-cam! He removes the carpet underneath from all the bollocks being said here..! Shaksper of Stratford was NOT Shakespeare!
yes they also teach Shakespeare in the British Caribbean, I had to read Macbeth in the 11th grade in Jamaica. Shakespeare could also have been very heavily inspired by Marlowe that his plays sounded like his, then after a while he developed his own individuality. There are so many possibilities to the history of this dude since we hardly know anything about him.
So someone wanted to see these plays produced and acted for the general public. They wished to remain anonymous. They had a third party pass the manuscript off to Shaksper on the condition that he claim authorship. This arrangement worked out well enough to be repeated, even after the playwright and Shaksper both had died. The true playwright was likely of noble birth considering the level of education necessary to write the plays. Until the heirs of that noble house choose to produce documentation, all we can do is guess. Will Graham suss it out? Maybe.
"He's run out on a debt of five shillings."
It was 1597, not 1593, and it was a tax bill from St. Helen's Bishopgate, not rent. As he was already a householder in Stratford and probably had moved out of St. Helen's by the time the tax was recorded, it's unknown if he even owed it.
St. Helen's Bishopgate was not, as the guest claims, a slum. It was one of the better areas of the city, with a number of prosperous residents.
"Mum's the word," probably refers to to Sir Francis Bacon, who was recently discovered by Jacob Roberts' decryption of the Shakespeare funerary plaque in Stratford-upon-Avon to be Shakespeare. It was an Autobiography of Bacon, who revealed that he was the legitimate son of Mary Queen of Scots and King Francis II (who died before Bacon's birth,) making him King Francis III. He was the older half-brother of James VI/I, making him heir of Elizabeth I of England also. Catherine de Medici tried to poison baby Francis and was furious to learn that he hadn't died. Mary appealed to her cousin Elizabeth, who agreed to let Mary return to Scotland, but baby Francis had to be placed with her Lady-in-waiting and her Keeper of the Great Seal, under Elizabeth 's close watch. Bacon felt betrayed by Mary, who lost him his birthright. The entire story comes back to the secret of his Mum.
There is one record of Shakespeare suing a local tavern keeper for payment of malt sold to him on credit. This was well into Shakespeare's career as a poet and after he purchased 107 acres of ag land in Stratford. There are no other records which would indicate selling grain was a business. There is no record of him lending money. Only one for selling grain on credit.
"These purchases start from the age of 30."
Shakespeare was 32 when he bought his house in Stratford. He was 39 when he first bought land, a decade after he was first identified as a poet.
The pen name, "Shakespeare" and the person, Shakspere, are two different things. They get connected after 1623 but Shakspere is still not "identified as a poet" since the sonnets are not in the 1623 folio. A 1599 collection of poems included works by Thomas Heywood who complained to the printer, Jaggard. Heywood complains but Shakspere never does. Never gets paid to write.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passionate_Pilgrim
@@apollocobain8363 A vast number of contemporaries identified William Shakespeare the poet as the gentleman, and actor from Stratford, both during his life and immediately after. I've shown you the evidence before so now you are repeating blatant lies.
And Heywood says the author, in the third person, complained. He does not say that he, himself did. After that Shakespeare's name was removed from the rest of the print run.
Q.E.D.
@@Jeffhowardmeade No one during Stratford Shakspere's life refers to HIM as a poet or a writer. A bit-part actor yes. A 1/8 shareholder in the Globe yes but a writer of any kind no. "Honey-tongued" refers to the writing itself; not to being in the presence of a writer named Shakespeare.
"Passionate Pilgrim is first printed by Jaggard in 1598 or 1599 and the title page says "by W. Shakespeare". The second edition in 1599 changes only the seller; to stationer William Leake who had bought the rights to "Venus and Adonis" (those rights were not purchased from Stratford Shakspere of course). The third printing is an expanded edition in 1612 and this is the print run that Heywood complains about with no result. Heywood refers to another person as "the author" -- he does not say "Shakspere" or Shakespeare or any other version of the name because he is referring to one of the real people who works Jaggard had printed and attributed falsely to the pen name "W. Shakespeare." Heywood could be referring to any one of the following real people whose writings were published by Jaggard under the name W. Shakespeare: Richard Barnfield, Bartholomew Griffin, Thomas Deloney, Christopher Marlowe, Walter Raleigh or the still unknown authors of the remaining 10 sonnets.
It is therefore not disputed by reasonable persons that 1) Jaggard used the name "W. Shakespeare" when printing works which were written by a wide variety of people none of whom were actually named Shakespeare, and 2) no one named Shakespeare complained or sought action to stop the works of others from being published under that name.
@@apollocobain8363 Just curious, but are you physically capable of admitting that you're wrong? Because I'll gladly inundate you with evidence that you're wrong if you'll promise to admit the fact.
Very interesting theory by Phillips. I don't know if I buy this theory entirely but I'm certainly tempted to do some more reading on the subject.
Why did he keep getting into trouble with the law in London? Not the action of a spy drawing attention to himself.
As for Shakey directing a team who wrote the plays. This is probably true. It is currently thought that Homer too was simply a name of several poets who wrote "his" works.
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"At the same time as he is buying 400 acres in Stratford..."
It was 107 acres, and that was not until 1602.
Great show ! Lots of new info for me, although I been kind of following the controversy of Willie The Shake for years ! Kudos !
Shakespeare used about 19,000 words, which only turns into 30,000 if you consider horse and horses and murder and murther different words. He was about average for poets of the era. The average person today does not have a vocabulary of only 2,000 words. Don't believe me? Open a dictionary and start reading and see how many of the words you don't know. The Merriam-Webster pocket edition has 75,000 words in it.
The first Latin-English translation dictionary was produced in 1538. The first English-only dictionary, complete with definitions, in 1604. It doesn't really matter because very little of a typical person's vocabulary is learned from dictionaries.
I've never heard anybody suggest that perhaps Shakespeare was a savant. There are savants studied today who baffle the minds of doctors, psychologists, neurologists, etc. What if his IQ was off then charts, had an unbelievable memory, could read a book in an hour, etc? Perhaps he was taken advantage of by using his plays and not paying him properly. I'm just throwing it out there.
Christopher Marlowe was an alias, and he didn't die. He was a spy and his death was staged. Interesting that the Privy Council stepped in when Cambridge was refusing to give him a graduation certificate, believing he was an atheist. They convinced the school that he was a great help to the country, and they gave it to him. If you look carefully at the portrait found in 1950s at Cambridge in a pile of wood that was attached to a heater in his former dorm room, it is relatively easy to decrypt, even I was able to do it. Hint- don't take dates to be correct on paintings from that time. The portrait was of another very famous person, who used the Marlowe alias, and was painted by Bacon, who was also a spy and a painter, engraver and a mapmaker, and used many aliases, including Shakespeare.
We have Dugdale's original sketch of the Shakespeare Funerary Monument. It's not very good and it's not hard to see how the engraver for the book got so many things wrong. The sketch nonetheless shows the figure wearing the scholar's subfusc and with his hands resting on a tassled pillow. Dugdale's notes includes the inscription comparing Shakespeare to the Roman poet Virgil. Aside from some well-documented repairs made over the centuries, the monument appears just as it did by its first attested appearance, and matches many other similar monuments from the era, all dedicated to learned men, none to tradesmen or merchants.
"The record shows that that wasn't put there until 1744 by a theatrical agent..."
There is no record of this at all. The first person to record the monument did so in about 1618. He was a fellow poet from London named John Weever. He transcribed the monument and identified it as "Willm Shakspeare the famous poet."
The question is how did a nobody from Avon end up with a bust of any kind in a church?
By being rich and from there?
@@Jeffhowardmeade Exactly!
Whether Graham Phillips is correct, I am not qualified to say. He his, however, an eloquent storyteller.
Most of the introduction is true, as I know it. What is very doubtful is that his name was known throughout England, and that he was immortalized in his lifetime. In contrast, after his death, his plays become LESS performed, less than Johnson's plays. His plays went out of fashion as Ford and other Jacobean writers became more well liked. Shakespeare's immortality, prophesized by Ben Johnson, did not come until centuries later. It was the actors that were well known back then, not the writers. Like today. Can you name the writer of your favorite TV show or movie?
They were still reprinting Venus and Adonis at the time of his death. I think they were on the 12th edition, or something. He wasn't completely forgotten, but he wasn't the rock star he is today.
I doubt there was anyone living in Cornwall who had ever read any poem, let alone one of his, so he was probably not known throughout England. Not completely.
Caius Martius Coriolanus What is the estimated percentage of literacy in England at that time?
I suspect that When William visited Stratford, and somebody would ask, "Who is that", the answer would not be, "The famous poet William Shakespeare", but "John Shakespeare's son, William."
Zenaida Robbins The King's School was chartered before Shakespeare's birth, but it had been around for a while before that. In a town of 2000 people of all ages, a school which could accommodate 50 of them at a time would likely have educated at least half of the male population. Even women were educated at petty schools (a London prostitute referred to a Stratford woman as a former classmate in a court deposition).
But being able to read and reading are two very different things. However he was viewed, a monument to Shakespeare the poet was erected in Holy Trinity Church. That would be rather pearls before swine if the townsfolk had no appreciation of who he was.
Caius Martius Coriolanus Right. We DO have the records of every Oxford don who taught at the Edward VI school, and how much they were paid, the years they taught, and where they lived.
Boys AND girls went to petit school to learn to read and write English. To enter grammar scool the child had to demonstrate that he could read and write English. It was not taught there.
Where did you get the stuff about the prostitue?? GREAT!!!!
Zenaida Robbins I'll have to track that one down. It think it was referenced in Ian Wilson's Shakespeare The Evidence.
JOHN FLORIO was the only one who got the knoledge, the patronages and books to write all the Shakespeare's works. Pay attention to all the italian literarian and geographical references!
Do you mean the Italian references where he got nearly everything wrong? How does a guy like Florio accidentally put Padua in Lombardy when it was in Veneto? How does he not know there are no tides in the Mediterranean? How does he not know that Venice is a republic?
i couldn't get past all of phillips' ridiculous, ignorant blunders about the monument and the 'dugdale drawing.' did the interviewer do any research on this guy's 'work' (or, more importantly, its refutation)?
+Chris Hanks You made it further than I did. I couldn't get past the assertion that an Elizabethan grammar school was dedicated to "reading, writing and arithmetic."
does the style of writing suggest more than one writer?
fascinating and interesting interview, thanks for sharing it.
The plays were Italian, they already existed. He just made the characters more realistic. He only wrote one or two plays of his own and he would only have had to have known a little bit of Greek and Latin, which he was probably taught at school.
Nonsense! He also needed to learn how to RIP OFF MARLOWE. Perfectly. The only way to do that is to be Marlowe.
ha ... nice work - keep on spreading Shak-spere the actor as a poet disinformation - you are clearly adapt at it ....
Interesting - fascinating even - yet not sure if the easier explanation would not just be that the Stratford upon Avon Will and the London Will are in fact two people - one a merchant - the other a spy and actor/playwright.
There is far too much documentation that the actor, poet, and businessman was from Stratford.
@@Jeffhowardmeade His will looks like it was written by someone unaccustomed to writing, a poorly educated man at best. Maybe Walsingham wrote the plays to keep the spy ring going with help from dead Marlowe's unfinished scripts.
@@MrAbzu That's funny, because his will was written by a professional law clerk. People then as now hire lawyers to write their wills. It's written in a script called "Secretary Hand" which was common at the time but is illegible to most people now. If one can read Secretary Hand, his will and his signatures are perfectly legible.
And I'll stack up scores of contemporaries who identified Shakespeare as a poet against your suppositions all day long.
@@Jeffhowardmeade Point taken, and I bet they can produce these poems written in his hand. Not only does he lack the education but even more glaringly, he lacks the personality. Maybe you should tell us how a skinflint and a cad wrote the plays and poems. You can convince me he wrote the plays if you exhume the body and find a chip in his head, you know, like Napoleon.
@@MrAbzu I'm sorry. I feel strange debating with a special person. I'll let the copious evidence speak for itself from here on out. The Folger Shakespeare Library has it all available in high resolution scans.
No chance the plays were written by committe..... it was a genius and a high ranking one, not a merchant from Stratford, who wrote the plays.
Got any evidence he was a merchant, or that he was in Stratford?
Wrong. Thomas Littleton, John Fletcher, etc.
Stratford was a village just north east of London. Stratford upon Avon is a town further away. Two different Stratford's, why not two different Shakespeare's? The only real question is, did they both have the same name or was the writer an alias?
@@MrAbzuThe Stratford near London was a wide spot in the road. Hardly anyone lived there in Shakespeare's day.
@@Jeffhowardmeade Well at least Sir Francis Bacon could write a legible William Shakespeare, many times over it would seem. It may be time for more monument makeovers. A hat, beard and mustache should do it. Enjoy. th-cam.com/video/QDn8gdBqnIM/w-d-xo.html
This is by far my favourite theory.
Shakespeare, the "Spear-Shaker" is my favorite Playwright".... Or by the name by which he is perhaps lesser known, "Christopher Marlowe."
Marlow: dead long before many of the plays were written, plus those confirmed by Marlowe quite different in style from Shakespeare's.
4:00 He also needs to have been someone who lived in Italy for an extended period. See: 'The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard's Unknown Travels'
47:00 No one knows when the plays were written! Why do so many people make this blatantly fallacious assumption? Is it more likely the plays were written over a longer period of time and then released or that they were all composed in 8 weeks or by 'assembly line'?
The plays are peppered with contemporary allusions which date them. Others either rely on sources and/or are the source for other works, giving them reliable earliest and latest possible days for composition.
The Shakespeare Guide to Italy shows that Marlowe exiled himself to Italy. The dates are not revised in the Marlovian account, except that some plays could be composed between 1616 and 1623, the "latest possible date" is more relaxed if you don't care about Shakespeare's life.
The Shakespeare Guide to Italy shows nothing of the sort. It shows that some of the things found in the Italian plays could be found in Italy, though like most Anti-Strat efforts, it involves seriously stretching the facts. The sycamore grove mentioned in R&J, for example, are not still found in Verona. Another species of tree planted after the war can be found there, however.
This proves nothing at all about Marlowe. In any case, if any of the works were written post 1616, it would be really stoopid to include them in a book you were purporting to be written by a guy who died in 1616.
Nonsense. The Shakespeare Guide to Italy shows the canal travel depicted in the scenes in Milan and Verona are accurate, that ALL the details, including the names of churches and obscure local references, are accurate, and it includes things like "Get thee to St. Gregory's Well" which are ejaculations which you COULDN'T POSSIBLY KNOW ABOUT without being there, as St. Gregory's well is a local tradition referring to a plague pit. LIkewise for the "Duke's Oak" of Midsummer's Night Dream (not an oak). Likewise for the "Emperor" in Milan (the Holy Roman Emperor stayed in Milan for two years, not only justifying the "Emperor" reference, but also dating the time depicted in the play precisely). There is no chance in Hell that Marlowe was not in Italy, and following the exact canal paths depicted in the plays (some of which are quite obscure). There is no stretching in the Shakespeare Guide, and the only dubious chapter is on the identification of Prospero's Island, as it is possible that "Caliban" and "Ariel" are borrowings from Shakespeare into the local dialect, rather than the other way around, as Roe argues. It requires a deeper investigation into the dialect history to be sure of this, so this is the only piece of evidence which is weak. The rest is sure and solid. It is especially striking in its analysis of Venice, which shows the locations for Merchant, to contrast with the stupid comments by mainstream scholars of "Why doesn't Shakespeare talk about Gondolas and flooded parts?", which ignore that this part of Venice is dry. It is the scholars who get everything wrong about Italy, not Shakespeare.
The Italian influence in the plays includes latin-language source material not translated and Commedia-del-Arte, both of which are not available in England. You are wrong.
The collection probably includes plays written after 1616, and published in the Folio for the first time. It does no damage to include them in the Folio, as nobody knows when they were written. Half the first-folio doesn't come with any dating or performance data. Shakespeare doesn't need to be alive to be credited, he is acting as a front for Marlowe, much as Ian Hunter fronted for Trumbo under similar political persecution in the 1950s.
It is also possible that Marlowe died in 1613. I don't know. But I tend to believe he died around 1620, and the final unfinished manuscripts are the Shakespeare "collaborations" from the last years (they were completed postumously by the collaborators without ever meeting Marlowe). But it doesn't matter how it happened. The works were written by Marlowe, as is clear from the stylometric data, and they were written in Italy, as is clear from internal evidence. This is firmly established, and denying it makes you a know-nothing.
As opposed to someone who knows everything, including things which are false. The stylometric data is clear that Marlowe was NOT Shakespeare. Commedia-dell'arte was well-known in England, as it had been around for a long time. Shakespeare's first clown, Will Kempe, had traveled all over Europe and Italian acting companies had done the same by Shakespeare's era. It doesn't show up in Shakespeare's work until later, when it started to make its mark in England, which makes one wonder where it was in all those Italian plays Marlowe wrote before The Tempest.
But just to seal the deal, ask yourself "How do I know all these details about Italy, since I've never been there?"
Obviously you don't know anything about Italy, because nobody could ever learn a damned thing about Italy from a book, or being told about it by someone else.
John Heminges, Henry Condell, and Richard Burbage, three actors of The Lord Chamberlain's Men, a famous acting company that included William Shakespeare, were given money by William Shakespeare of Stratford in his Last Will and Testament in 1616. Two of these actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were responsible for having 36 of Shakespeare's plays published in the First Folio in 1623. Ben Jonson's eulogy in the First Folio clearly praises Shakespeare as a great writer. He states that "thy writings to be such, /As neither Man, nor Muse, can praise too much." Heminges and Condell also praise Shakespeare as a writer, stating that "he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our province, who onely gather his works, and give them you, to praise him." These are "his works" and "his papers" that they are publishing. He is clearly presented as the writer of these works in the First Folio. The Last Will and Testament of William Shakespeare of Stratford clearly connects him with the 1623 First Folio through Heminges and Condell and it is clear that Shakespeare is presented as the author of the plays.
So who managed Shakespeare's grain business while he was in London?
His wife. A shepherd indicated in his will that "Anne Shaxpere wyfe unto Mr Wyllyam Shaxpere" had 40 shillings of his. Whether an old debt (the shepherd once worked for her father), a new one, or money he had left for safekeeping with her, it shows that she was capable of handing things on her own.
@@Jeffhowardmeade So then, let us add the word "functional" before the word ignoramus as a qualifier. She was a "functional ignoramus", bravo.
@@MrAbzu It's not my task to defend the business acumen of Shakespeare's wife from assholes. But if you really wanted to know (though it's clear you really don't), Shakespeare's brother Gilbert (1566-1612) also handled matters on his brother's behalf, including going to court for a real estate transaction. His father, once a mayor and justice of the peace, was living there, and his mother who was once made executor of her father's will, was also still present. Finally, we know he had a lawyer as a tenant in New Place for some time.
Are you now satisfied that there were plenty of people back in Stratford who were capable of handling matters for Shakespeare?
Or are you just an asshole?
Have you tried J T Looney? His book has been wrongly bad-mouthed for a century now. The very fact of its successful censorship over this time, and yet the magnetic force of his arguments the strength of which have swayed the minds of our greatest thinkers leaves a very embarrassing taste in one's mouth regarding the Stratfordian scholarship. But you can't do it without reading Shakespeare in context of the Looney argument. My advice to anyone is to read Looney with Shakespeare.
Looney is rightly forgotten (not censored) because he was full of crap.
I call him the tourist trap guy.
Ever been there?
What happened to Shakespeare's share of the King's men?
The shares reverted to the remaining members when a sharer died or retired. In 1607 William Sly died, and his 1/7 share reverted to the others, who then gave it to William Ostler. When Ostler died in 1614, his widow sued to keep her late husband's share. It's unknown how the case was resolved, but it shows the standard practice. A sharer was one who contributed to the operation of the company, not merely a stock holder.
Ask his wife! If one would propose this task & research what the wife's reply would be then William Shakespeare is AKA or a pseudonym. P.S. Just place the correct answer on the test & you'll do okay. After all it's part of the greatness of England. Love Tourism!
So a well off Shakespeare needs a patron in London? Does not quite add up, sounds like two different people with the same name. The tax records seem to indicate that the patron thing did not work out too well.
The tax rolls don't tell us anything of the sort. There is nothing which can be inferred about the tax except that Shakespeare, who had become a householder in Stratford and paid taxes there, had not paid it.
@@Jeffhowardmeade It was on a different document and was included as part of the story. I do a better job of remembering what I read than where I read it so you can find it for yourself. I cannot imagine how this tidbit slipped by you.
@@MrAbzu I'm familiar with all the evidence that exists regarding Shakespeare. There are two documents regarding Shakespeare and taxes, both from the parish of St. Helens Bishopgate. One from 1597 says Shakespeare owes 5s on a putative wealth of £5, and the next year another says he owes 13s 4d, and still hasn't paid. Though there is no explanation as to how an individuals wealth was calculated, £5 is about average for the personal property owned by someone then dwelling in rented rooms. As other documents indicate that he had already bought New Place and was therefore a householder in Stratford, and may have already moved to Southwark (you already know more about the Langley Writ than actually exists in it), there are debates as to whether he actually owed it. We don't know if it was settled or if the parish simply wrote it off. He doesn't appear in the 1600 records.
Venus and Adonis was published at a time when the theaters were closed, drying up a substantial source of Shakespeare's income, perhaps his only source. Only a year earlier Shakespeare's father was noted as one who didn't come to church for fear of "processe for debte". The purchase of New Place in 1596 followed two popular works dedicated to a wealthy patron, the reopened theaters, and evidence of royal patronage for his company. Shakespeare's fortunes by 1596 were on the rise.
It is entirely possible that the tax-defalting William Shakespeare was a different man of the same name, as it is nearly the only record of a William Shakespeare without context indicating he's a gentleman or in some way attached to the theater. The fact that this other William Shakespeare appears and then disappears entirely from the record without benefit of a local birth or burial suggests it is likely the same man. But hey, very nice of you to try to exonerate our beloved Bard from allegations of tax dodging. 😀
@@MrAbzu I've now listened to about half of this and the guest is just making stuff up. If you think this is a reliable source, then I hope someone less gullible handles your money for you.
@@Jeffhowardmeade That is how everyone writes a book about Shakespeare, they make things up because no one knows anything. At least he tried to hide Shakespeare's criminal pursuits behind a theory of him being a spy for Walsingham, which may explain his modest rap sheet. Lets see, he spent a couple hundred pounds in Stratford for a house and land, a hundred and forty pounds for a house in London, he purchased a coat of arms for his father and shares in two theater companies. Country bumpkins did not come by that kind of money honestly back then. The plays up front were the loss leader while the real money was made out back.
The bequeath to shareholders to buy rings was added later
It was included in the official copy made about two months later at the probate court, so it was contemporaneous.
Nice video. Thanks.
a director of a writing syndicate. SNL, and Thalberg
NATIONAL LAMPOON, MAD MAG
Sir Francis Bacon, son of Queen Elixabeth and Robert Dudley was the Author of both Marlowe and Shakespeare works....deal with it
+Matthew Stull When exactly did he find time to write almost 50 plays for the London theater for specific actors that are mentioned in the plays when he spent so much time in Paris, in writing his own ponderous tomes and his normal royal duties?
during and after always writing, dude.....he was francis bacon....his ponderous tomes came out later...you've got some catching up to do hahhaha. you can start by turning your brayne on !!! wwwwooooooooossssshhhh
And you can prove that...DUDE?
why prove something that is trooo? MANG!! hey, zjoo know... I gottttta lotttta spaghetti onna my playtah, man...hokayyyyy?? capeeeesh???
But you got enough time to post to TH-cam videos. Just cuz you say its true doesn't make it true.
Ain't true unless you can prove it. Capeesh
19:15 uh Blackfriars in the East End? Right.
ws was a front for state propaganda ?
Yeh, that would be a great theory except that when you look at the plays it's just not true. It was a performance of Richard II that was used as a trigger for the Essex rebellion ffs. Only in Richard III is the writer forced to take sides between Tudor and Plantagenet, and nobody was going to be dumb enough to suggest that the Tudors were usurpers.
ws found his library through the earl of s Hampton
Lots of surmising no facts. This biopic is a nice piece of fiction.
Thank you Henry Neville (aka William Shakespeare).
This is a fascinating interview. Obviously, there is more to Shakespeare than the traditional view. But how is it that the collaborative productions up until Shakespeare became involved were just OK (popular in their time, probably because the stories were well-known or archetypal, and gave the great actors like Burbage their chance to strut and fret) but are now largely ignored, whereas the Shakespeare collaborations, after a couple of false starts, quickly assumed the status of towering works of genius, still relevant and essential today? One could say Shakespeare was The Beatles to Marlowe's Herman's Hermits.
Clifford Hughes ...or Mozart to Salieri.
Clifford Hughes It also depends on taste of the era. Henry VIII and Timon of Athens were pretty popular and produced a lot in the 19th century but in the 20th stopped being produced. Today some more obscure works are more widely done when they weren't before so part of it could be tastes change.
They were history plays. Only Shakespeare diehards like the history plays.
The average person does not have a vocabulary of only 2,000 words, and Shakespeare only had a vocabulary of 30,000 words if you consider "horse" to be a different word from "horses".
The first translation dictionaries were produced before Shakespeare was born. The first word lists were printed when Shakespeare was a young man. The first dictionary to include definitions was printed in 1604.
+Jeffhowardmeade An Elizabethan grammar school delivered a rigorous classical education in Latin.
+Jeffhowardmeade Okay, I'm barely five minutes in and the number of factual errors they've made makes me think it's not worth listening to the rest.
+Jay Bee There is a ton of evidence. I would go to the trouble of spelling it out for you yet again, but you will promptly ignore it and default back to your uninformed opinion and make the same claims later.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but my opinion is better informed than yours because I stick with things I can prove, and you just make stuff up.
Very interesting..
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I thought this was something rotten
Shakespeare in espionage
Also Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare were two different people who never met.
Probably not true. Shakespeare was an actor in a company which played Marlowe's plays. Recent stylometry shows that Marlowe probably wrote a few scenes in a play attributed to Shakespeare (one of the Henry VI plays, I think). Shakespeare's early work often seems to be a conscious immitation of Marlowe. Green was addressing Marlowe in his Groat's Worth of Wit, and complaining about Shakespeare as if Marlowe should know who that is. The theater scene was not a large one. While there is no proof, I think it highly unlikely that they never met.
Stylometry shows that the Shakespeare plays were all written by Marlowe. But since Marlowe evolved so quickly, if you insist on finding micro-separators, you can divide Marlowe into "Very Early Marlowe" (Marlowe's work) "Middle Marlowe" (Early Shakespeare) and "Mature Marlowe" (Late Shakespeare). The reason Henry VI is now "coauthored by Marlowe" is just that Henry VI parts 1,2,3 are the earliest plays in Shakespeare's folio. They were written in the late 1580s or in 1590, at the same time as the other undenied Marlowe works. So the identity with Marlowe is obvious because it is the same person at the same time. But all the plays in the First Folio were written by Marlowe, just some were written much later, under Italian influence, with more maturity, and more comedy, so the academics are too stupid to realize it yet. But it is still obviously the same writer as for Henry VI.
Yeah, believe what you want. The fact that a few scenes of Henry IV match Marlowe's style and the rest don't in the same play is because he didn't write it all. The reason "Early Marlowe" isn't the same as "Middle Marlowe" is because there was no "Middle Marlowe". He was dead. Shakespeare wasn't, and started writing about then, probably after having performed in plays by Marlowe.
Caius Martius Coriolanus You are talking nonsense. I just watched a performance of Richard II, and it is obviously by Marlowe from beginning to end, with echoes of all the previous plays, including Marlowe's favorite word "Jade", and a whole riff on "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?" (it's the king staring at the mirror, and wondering why his face is still so unlined). This stuff was written by Marlowe, and it is all in his style, and all you need is a computer and some statistics to demonstrate it.
And yet when High Craig and Arthur Kinney did exactly that, they determined that Henry VI was by several different authors, and that the rest of Shakespeare had no overlap with Marlowe at all.
You see what you want to see. The vast body of Shakespeare scholarship sees something else.
ws wrote sonnets to his dead son
May I point out (politely) that a good deal of this is factually incorrect, and that the assertions made here are not backed up by evidence.
A complete crock. For instance: he needed a university education. Bob Dylan didn't make it through a year of university and he's extremely widely read, as many autodidacts are. Then there's the Catholic/Prot controversy, which is clearly built into both the plays and the society of the Elizabethan and then Stuart England.
Where would he have had access to that information? It's easier to be an autodidact in the 21st century. In the Elizabethan era access to information was not commonplace.
@@RussellScottHD St. Paul's Churchyard, for one. There was a thriving bookselling business there. Shakespeare, wealthy by the standards of the day, could have purchased any book he needed.
But he didn't need to buy them. It turns out that the printer who published everything Shakespeare wrote specifically for publication was a fellow Stratfordian named Richard Field. Will and Richard grew up in the same neighborhood and later in his career Shakespeare gave Richard a shout-out in Cymbeline. Why this is important is because Richard Field also printed an astonishingly high number of Shakespeare's sources.
What are the odds?
Is there any evidence William Shakspere, claimed to write these plays?
@@BullittblThe plays? No. His fellow actors claimed he did, as well as everyone who put his name on one they published. He claimed authorship of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which are poems, not plays.