Smeared Type

Over Labor Day weekend, I was in Wisconsin at the “American Players Theater,” where local actor, James DeVita, was performing a One-Man-Show – “Acting Shakespeare.”  This incredible and entertaining performance was broadly based on the Broadway format presented by the renowned English Shakespearean actor, Sir Ian McKellen in the late 1980’s. 

James DeVita’s entertaining performance described how he became a Shakespearean actor and the trials and tribulations that he suffered along the way.  But he also brought to the audience’s attention some history and facts about William Shakespeare.

We’re told that the Bard’s education didn’t go beyond a primitive grammar school.  Thus, he probably finished his formal education at age fourteen.  At age eighteen when he was working in his father’s leather business, he married Anne Hathaway eight years his senior, who was already pregnant with his child.  At age twenty-one, he decided to leave his wife, child, and father’s business and go to London to become an actor.  During the next eighteen years, Shakespeare “wrote” thirty-seven plays and hundreds of sonnets. 

I have read a number of books about Shakespeare over the years. Some biographies cover his life and describe the brilliance of the man, but other books have endeavored to prove that Shakespeare didn’t write anything and that the plays that we are so familiar with were written by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. 

There are many mysteries surrounding the life of William Shakespeare.  Perhaps the most telling, which convinced me that this poorly educated man who had never left the shores of England could not have written all of those plays, is that when he died at the age of fifty-two back in Stratford-Upon-Avon, his Will made no mention of any of his plays, sonnets, or anything to do with his theatrical background, nor did he leave manuscripts, notes, or records relating to such a body of work, or mention any of his co-actors, producers and directors during his eighteen years in London. 

In addition, it is recognized his Will was poorly drawn, badly written and ungrammatical.  Could this really be William Shakespeare?  I decided there was a much better case to prove that De Vere was the true author of much of Shakespeare’s work; but, because of the fact that he was an aristocrat at the Court of Queen Elizabeth and a homosexual, he used Shakespeare as his “front man” at a time when anything to do with the theatre was considered low-class, rough, and tough. The theatre was banned from operating within the city limits, and no person of “class” would be seen at these entertainments.

So my conclusion is that William Shakespeare probably did not write these plays.  What do you think?

Ellis M. Goodman, author of Bear Any Burden: www.bearanyburden.com