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Who Was Shakespeare?
by Colin Wilson.
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Colin Wilson brings up the question of identity of the real author of works ascribed to Shakespeare, known in his time as an actor, a butcher's son and as a playwright, one who left no library, not even one of his own works.
Wilson describes various researchers going into the question, and concluding, mostly, that Francis Bacon was the obvious author of the works. But then he delivers a swift judgement with good reasoning, accompanied by a shirt sketch of Francis Bacon, to say that it's difficult to imagine the two being same.
"Bacon is a baffling character, a strange mixture of greatness and pettiness. He was the most intelligent man of his time, and in some ways one of the nastiest. It would be difficult to conceive a character more totally unlike Shakespeare’s. The dramatist had genius; yet in a sense was not particularly intelligent. He wrote as naturally as a bird sings. The pessimism in which he frequently indulges is the pessimism of a child who has just lost a favourite toy, not the gloomy cynicism of the brilliant intellectual who despises his own craving for success. It is as impossible that Bacon could have written Shakespeare as that Schopenhauer could have written Alice in Wonderland."
Wilson next presents the case for Christopher Marlowe and argues against it. Next, Wilson discusses another candidate, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. He goes then into the story of William Shakespeare and the two Annes in his life.
" ... Neither Bacon nor Derby nor Oxford nor Marlowe nor even Anne Whateley finally emerge as a more convincing candidate than the Stratford actor.
"But what of the Stratford actor? It seems, to put it mildly, unlikely that a man whose father was illiterate and whose children were illiterate, and who could not even be bothered to keep copies of his own books in the house, should have written Hamlet and Othello. We may reject all the other candidates as absurd; but at the end of the day we still find ourselves facing the same problems that made the Rev. James Wilmot conclude that, whoever wrote the plays and sonnets, it was not William Shakespeare."
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December 18, 2021 - December 19, 2021.
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