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“Who wrote Shakespeare?”
For
more than 150 years, experts and amateurs have been debating what seems
like a ridiculous question, one similar to “Who is buried in Grant’s
tomb?” The debate has created its own title, “The Authorship
Question.” It has its passionate fans of various contenders for authorship,
and the fans cast insults at each other as hatefully as did the Catholics
and Protestants of Shakespeare’s time. And here I am, about to throw
one more hat into this ring. I contend a woman wrote the works attributed
to the man named William Shakespeare.
Let’s take a quick look at why there is an Authorship Question in the first place. Tens of thousands of books have been written about William Shakespeare, the plays, the sonnets, and the Authorship Question—some say Shakespeare is the most researched topic on earth. Despite this vast amount of study, there is no other human being as famous as William Shakespeare about whom we know so little. Entire biographies are written on conjectures about what he ³must surely² have done and felt and thought.
We know these facts: He was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, married in 1582 at the age of 18; his wife was eight years older and pregnant. They had three children by the time Shakespeare was twenty years old. He left his family to go to London where he was sometimes an actor, a manager, a shareholder in various acting companies. His name was applied to many plays, several lengthy poems, and a collection of 154 sonnets, most of which are love poems to a young man. He bought the second-largest house and other properties in Stratford-upon-Avon, sued people for pennies and was sued for pennies, defaulted on his taxes of 13 shillings and 4 pence several times, had a will in which he parceled out his valuables, which did not include one book, one manuscript, one poem, one mention of any works he might have written. He died in 1616 at age 52. We also know that his parents, wife, and two daughters were illiterate (his son died at age eleven).
Design
Notes:
This site is based on a book being researched and written by Robin Williams.
The site (and this page) is incomplete, but we've used it as an example
in the Web Design Workshop book. The complete site will
be available late 2001 at MarySidney.com.
The illustration is by John Tollett and was created using Corel Painter.