Itisi

Yet another theory about who wrote Shakespeare’s play, this time they are accredited to two separate individuals.

I realise this is probably due to a sense of regional pride, but I do get rather tired of the snobbery of some of the proponents of theories which suggest Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him. The reasons given are so incredibly pompous and rely on the assumption that Shakespeare was a barely literate hick from some rustic backwater while plays can only be written by posh folk from major cities.

The idea that Shakespeare was uneducated is wrong. In fact he attended a prestigious school, most of his fellow pupils would have gone to university and he would have received an education far beyond the basic three Rs.

Equally false is the notion that Stratford was some rural back-water populated by rustic types where nothing changed from year to year. It was an important river crossing (hence the name) on the main roads between London, Oxford and York and was the site of both markets and fairs which would have attracted people from all over the area. The world and his wife would have passed through the town and as a young boy Shakespeare would have come into contact with a wide variety of people. The areas around the town were the locations of a number of important battles, both before and after Shakespeare was alive, for example, the Battle of Evesham, and people known to the Shakespeares were involved in national events, including the Gun Powder Plot.

Daftest of all is the idea that one can not write about something one has never experienced. Bram Stoker was never held captive by a Transylvanian vampire and Margaret Mitchell did not live through the American Civil War, but both managed to write about those subjects successfully by using a little thing called imagination!

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