I am, unfortunately, a dedicated conspiracy theorist. No, not the braying, unintelligent kind like Alex Jones who has an unhinged and hidden agenda. More the Indiana Jones kind, seeking the truth no matter where it leads, but always relying on research, science, and creative methods of re-framing the facts in order to reveal truths that other people don’t see even when the answers are right in front of them.
An example of this is my firm belief that everything we think we know about the man known as William Shakespeare is based on an ages-old deception and is basically an unrevealed lie.
Of course, I am not the only literature-obsessed kook who has ever taken up this notion of someone else having written the great works of Shakespeare. I share the opinion with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Walt Whitman, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dickens, Actor Derek Jacobi, and the great Mark Twain (also not the writer’s real name) .
The biggest question that I can see when looking at the man we pretend is the actual author of the plays, is why doesn’t this man look like an author? As brought out in the video, the only example we have of the author’s own handwriting are six signatures from legal documents, three of which come from his last will and testament. And if the name is really William Shakespeare, then the Stratford man misspelled his own name. He wrote it as Shakspere or Shaksper. And the handwriting is atrocious, nothing like the carefully practice signature I sometimes put on my own handwritten work. How does that happen? I have seen signatures by many other authors, both famous and obscure, and nowhere do I see such careless script as what is allegedly the signature of the greatest and most acclaimed writer who ever lived.
The accepted life story of Shaksper doesn’t bear up under scrutiny either. In spite of being a wealthy businessman and mayor, his father can be seen to be provably illiterate, relying on associates and underlings to write the paperwork involved in his business and mayoral rule. There is no proof in the form of enrollment lists or written record of Shaksper having ever enrolled at or attended the school that supposedly taught Stratfordian youths to read and write. His wife and children and grandchildren were also provably illiterate. What other writer has such a lack of effect on his own family?
And Shaksper’s will details everything he owned and left to others at his death. Nowhere is there a mention of plays, manuscripts, poetry, or even books. The greatest author who ever lived owned no books at all? He was provably wealthy enough to buy books, and public libraries did not exist back then. How then did he demonstrate such knowledge of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, as well as the functioning of royal courts both in England and abroad? How did he get so many details right about places in Italy and Europe which he had never visited or seen with his own eyes? Something is definitely missing.
It is true that everything mentioned is merely circumstantial evidence. And yet, if all circumstantial evidence leans in only one direction, then isn’t the conclusion probably sound?
But if Shaksper, the Stratford man, did not write the masterful literary works he has been given credit for, then who did? And why did he let the credit go to someone else?
Ah, I am betting you are beginning to smell a multi-part essay brewing. I mean to tell you who I think is under the mask, who it was I believe actually wrote under the pen name of William Shakespeare.
