There was a man, born into abject poverty. He had only six months of formal schooling and lived in the most provincial and isolated part of the country. For the first thirty years of his life, he worked a long series of menial jobs. During his off hours, he read every book he could get his hands on, from the Bible to the classics to poetry. He began writing. First, very bad poetry, but later, purely through his own commitment to self-iimprovement and his towering intellect, he became one of the finest writers of his age, and his best speeches could rival any words of the poets of his age, who acknowledged his dexterity with the pen, even though his spelling was atrocious.
His name was Abraham Lincoln.
No one has ever doubted that Lincoln himself wrote his greatest essays and speeched--the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural speech, the "House Divided."
So, why do so many doubt that, three hundred years before Lincoln, Shakespeare could have overcame humble beginnings in a provincial backwater and a lack of university education and, leveraging his innate genius, literary ambitions, and commitment to self-improvement, read through all the classic literature he could get his hands on, saw all the plays he could see, and, starting with some rather humble works that weren't all that differentiated from his competitors, used his astounding insights into the human psyche to develop a whole new way of looking at the world through his plays?
Why does the lack of manuscripts and a clear letter stating "Yes, I wrote all of my plays, thank you" serve as proof that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays? Just because we don't have the manuscripts doesn't mean they don't exist. He might have kept them all in a chest at his Stratford manor to be tossed out or used as privvy paper by his daughter after he died. Or he may have kept none of them, since plays were such reviled forms of entertainment (the equivalent of TV scripts in their day) that the manuscripts would have had no value--writers only got copyrights after they were printed.
I just don't get the arguments of the Oxfordians and the other authorship doubters. They apply 20th century standards of literacy and pride in copyright to Elizabethean times and their judgement that people can't rise above their statement to bolster their arguments.
Maybe as a Yank, growing up in a country built on the premise that anyone could rise from poverty and achieve literary greatness through self-education. If we applied the standards of Oxfordians to our own literary greats, Ben Franklin's essays must have been written by William Penn, Alexander Hamilton's by his arch-enemy Thomas Jefferson, and Lincoln's by Steven Douglas. Fortunately, we've got enough manuscripts and author proofs of authorship to disprove such claims of ghostwriting. But the lack of such evidence shouldn't be used to disprove that Shakespeare penned his own poetry.
J--I-B
His name was Abraham Lincoln.
No one has ever doubted that Lincoln himself wrote his greatest essays and speeched--the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural speech, the "House Divided."
So, why do so many doubt that, three hundred years before Lincoln, Shakespeare could have overcame humble beginnings in a provincial backwater and a lack of university education and, leveraging his innate genius, literary ambitions, and commitment to self-improvement, read through all the classic literature he could get his hands on, saw all the plays he could see, and, starting with some rather humble works that weren't all that differentiated from his competitors, used his astounding insights into the human psyche to develop a whole new way of looking at the world through his plays?
Why does the lack of manuscripts and a clear letter stating "Yes, I wrote all of my plays, thank you" serve as proof that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays? Just because we don't have the manuscripts doesn't mean they don't exist. He might have kept them all in a chest at his Stratford manor to be tossed out or used as privvy paper by his daughter after he died. Or he may have kept none of them, since plays were such reviled forms of entertainment (the equivalent of TV scripts in their day) that the manuscripts would have had no value--writers only got copyrights after they were printed.
I just don't get the arguments of the Oxfordians and the other authorship doubters. They apply 20th century standards of literacy and pride in copyright to Elizabethean times and their judgement that people can't rise above their statement to bolster their arguments.
Maybe as a Yank, growing up in a country built on the premise that anyone could rise from poverty and achieve literary greatness through self-education. If we applied the standards of Oxfordians to our own literary greats, Ben Franklin's essays must have been written by William Penn, Alexander Hamilton's by his arch-enemy Thomas Jefferson, and Lincoln's by Steven Douglas. Fortunately, we've got enough manuscripts and author proofs of authorship to disprove such claims of ghostwriting. But the lack of such evidence shouldn't be used to disprove that Shakespeare penned his own poetry.
J--I-B
; William wasnt anywhere near as influential.
