Think William Shakespeare couldn’t come up with those plays, sceptics?

Mark Rylance

The Shakespeare authorship question has raised its head again, with Mark Rylance voicing his doubts about the ‘man from Stratford’ on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, coinciding with a four-day event for sceptics at Brunel University.

Few Shakespearian specialists from the world of literary scholarship take the authorship ‘question’ seriously, and they can perhaps be forgiven for seeing events such as this as little more than an annoyance.

As ever, though, I’m struck by…

via Think William Shakespeare couldn’t come up with those plays, sceptics?

5 comments on “Think William Shakespeare couldn’t come up with those plays, sceptics?”

beetleypete
04/30/2018

Good arguments. I recall a lot of Bacon/Marlowe advocates many years ago. They were often convincing too. 🙂
Best wishes, Pete. x
First Night Design
04/30/2018

Common sense, really. To suggest otherwise, as Rylance and his like do, betrays a classist, snobbish attitude that seems to say one can only be intelligent if one is upper class. Absolute b******s!
beetleypete
04/30/2018

Well said, Sarah. x
Ben Herman: In My Not So Humble Opinion
05/01/2018

I’ve always agreed with the sentiment that it was incredibly snobbish to imply that only someone from an upper-class background would have possessed the intelligence and talent to write Shakespeare’s plays.

Of course, I’ve also felt that Shakespeare’s work was hijacked by the literary critics a long time ago, and as a result it is easy to forget that his plays were the popular entertainment of their day. There is a certain snobbishness in that as well, because certain critics will never ever want to acknowledge that anything created for the masses can also be intelligent and philosophical and deeply concerned with exploring the human condition.
First Night Design
05/01/2018

Absolutely, Ben. That snobbism is still a huge part of 21st-century life and the attitude needs to be eradicated from the earth.