Who Wrote the Works of Shakespeare?

Short answer: William Shakespeare

Longer answer: All the evidence historians use to discern truth points to the conclusion that the plays we ascribe to William Shakespeare were written by William Shakespeare of Statford-upon-Avon, who lived between 1564 and 1616. Arguments to the contrary are made for reasons of either prejudice or envy.

Prejudice

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, certain academic rationalists embraced the idea that William Shakespeare, who had not gone to university at Oxford or Cambridge as they had, could therefore not have known enough to write the works ascribed to him. They did not want to feel that their own superior education was rendered nugatory by the fact that the greatest poetic genius of all time was a country bumpkin who had not studied at the university.

(They were later countered by anti-rationalist Romantics who turned Shakespeare into an idol of “natural genius,” as if he had sprung full-blown from the Stratford sheep cotes knowing the whole nature of man. Also silly, but at least they believed Shakespeare was Shakespeare.)

In addition to arrogance, the prejudice against the non-academic Shakespeare showed ignorance:

First, because during Shakespeare’s life, what was studied at Oxford and Cambridge was principally law—majors in English literature, history, mathematics, biology, botany, French, psychology, sociology, agriculture, marketing, international relations, and creative writing were not yet available; and

Second, because during Shakespeare’s youth the education of intelligent and promising boys in local grammar schools in England, set up on the principles of Erasmus and Thomas More, was extremely thorough: Already versed in the catechism (fundamentals of Christian faith), boys studied grammar, logic, rhetoric, epistles, orations, poetry and versification, moral history, and moral philosophy—all in Latin—and read Tully, Cicero, Quintilian, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, Lucan, Martial, Catullus, Seneca, Erasmus, and others—also all in Latin; by about age 14 or 15 they were studying Greek grammar—in Latin—and beginning to translate into Latin passages in the Greek New Testament. In short, by the time a boy finished grammar school, he had been exposed to more classical language and literature than any but the most accomplished graduate students of those subjects today, and he could thereafter build with further reading upon a broad and deep foundation of learning.

Given that education, any boy with Shakespeare’s particular gifts of intelligence, memory, imagination, insight, verbal skill, and sublime ear could have written his works. By the same token, no boy without those gifts, however steeped in the legal studies of the universities of the time, could possibly have written a word of them.

The prejudice against Shakespeare for being a commoner is even less respectable. Certain aristocrats and their descendants have believed that only an aristocrat could have written Shakespeare’s plays. Who else would understand so well what went on at court? they argue. Well, anyone with Shakespeare’s particular gifts of intelligence, memory, imagination, insight, verbal skill, sublime ear, and a grammar-school education who had ever been to court—that’s who. Inheritors of the values of the American Revolution above all should not be taken in by the flimsy arguments of the aristocracy snobs, against whom the equally empty counter-argument might be leveled: What aristocrat would have known such details as Shakespeare did of the lives of seamen, ostlers, shepherds, grammar school pedants, and Bedlam beggars? Shakespeare, who was Shakespeare, knew both court and countryside.


Envy

Here is the real culprit. It is perfectly clear that whoever wrote the plays ascribed to Shakespeare was the greatest dramatic and poetic genius of the English language. But some people don’t like that fact. They feel that the uniqueness of Shakespeare’s greatness demeans them; therefore it embarrasses them, and so annoys them. They conceive an impulse to take Shakespeare down a peg. So they sift through his works and the dusty documents of history looking for shreds of evidence that might knock Shakespeare’s reputation into a cocked hat. It is a classic case of envy at work.

It is a fact of human nature that anyone who looks for such evidence out of envy will surely believe he has found it, and will soon feel compelled to persuade others of the validity of his findings. The irony is that rarely do any two envy-driven scholars agree on who did write Shakespeare’s works. They have provided the world with specious arguments for ascribing the works to at least fifty different people, ranging from Queen Elizabeth to a secret society of occultists. A short glance at the internet will yield, from among fifty or more, a list including

Francis Bacon
Christopher Marlowe
William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby
Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland
his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Philip Sidney
her aunt Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford
Sir Henry Neville, Elizabethan diplomat
Sir Edward Dyer, poet
William Nugent, Irish rebel
St. Edmund Campion, Catholic martyr
Queen Elizabeth I
King James I
Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote
a secret society of hermetic anchemist Rosicrucians
an imaginary Arab named Shaykh Zubair (whose name was obviously corrupted later)
and
every other known playwright, poet, and prose writer of the Elizabethan/Jacobean age.

A wit once remarked, “If Bacon wrote Shakespeare, who wrote Bacon?” It is a wonderful question because it expresses the truth that every writer writes with the signature of his own character and imagination. No two authorial styles, just like no two handwritings, are or can be alike. The same person could not have written both the works ascribed to Shakespeare and the works by which he himself or she herself is known. We could equally say, if Queen Elizabeth I wrote Shakespeare, who wrote the Queen’s words? If Marlowe wrote Shakespeare, who wrote Marlowe? And so on. Only ignorance about quality and style in literary works could allow anyone to believe such fantasies.

Still less is it believable that the works could have been written by a group, as one may gather from reading any report produced by a committee. Committee writing dissolves individual style, sometimes sublimely, as in the King James translation of the Bible, but nonetheless thoroughly. The Declaration of Independence was amended, we know, but its every sentence bears the stamp of the mind and style of Thomas Jefferson, and students of American history and of Jefferson can see it perfectly clearly. Similarly, every line of Shakespeare reveals his unique imaginative and verbal genius. Shakespeare transcends his own personality to achieve Olympian universality, but he does so through a unique ability to incarnate meaning in particulars that never has been and never will be seen in the work of a committee.

There’s an old Jewish joke: “If I were Rothschild,” said the schoolteacher of Chelm, “I’d be richer than Rothschild.” “Why?” “I’d do a little teaching on the side.” And so with the ascribing business. Prove that you know who “really” wrote Shakespeare and voila—you are better than Shakespeare (having done a little sleuthing on the side).

It is nothing but envy. Note it well.


There is no credible evidence that anyone other than Shakespeare wrote the works ascribed to him, and there is plenty of evidence that Shakespeare did. But whoever the author was, his works provide some of the greatest emotional, intellectual, moral, and spiritual experiences ever evoked by words. It is not the author’s name but his works that matter. Read them and give thanks.