William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was born in 1564 supposedly to an illiterate glove maker. He moved to England at a young age. Being new and a country boy didn’t seem to stop him from becoming one of the most popular English writers. He didn’t have any upper level experience in school. When he was first in London he worked in theatres as an apprentice becoming familiar with that setting. He started acting and doing different scenes. He was known to be a good actor.
Later on he started to write plays. He did this from all his past experience with acting and his knowledge of different pieces. He wrote them based on his life in England, religion upcoming, and his childhood. Shakespeare has written hundreds of pieces over his life span you wouldn’t ever think to accuse him of being a fraud right? Well not everyone has the same view on Shakespeare. If you really think about it you begin to question it too. Think about yourself in this situation. Imagine being a teenager who hasn’t gone off to college yet but you hung around theaters and started to become very familiar with them and acting. Do you think just off this experience you could write what is now known to be the best playwrights in history? I don’t think so.
When you start to dig deeper in Shakespeare’s life you will seem to find nothing of great importance relating to his many works. It just stated that he was simply and actor and slightly a writer. There has been no evidence of any diaries or letters actually written by Shakespeare himself. His name just seems to appear on some legal documents and his supposedly playwrights. Some people have found secret codes in his plays that hint Shakespeare wasn’t real. For example, by counting the difference in total words in two passages from Henry IV, Part I, multiplying that by the number of hyphenations, then using the result to move up or maybe down a page somewhere else, you can begin to extract hidden messages in the plays, such as "shak'st ... spur ... never ... writ ... a ... word ... of ... them (Doug Stewart). So the real question is who really wrote all of these plays?
There have been 60 people who could be the real Shakespeare, these people being Sir Walter Ralegh, Christopher Marlowe and Queen Elizabeth herself. The popular favorite among skeptics of the 19th and early 20th centuries was Francis Bacon, philosopher and writer (Doug Stewart). There is also will of Stratford who supposedly called himself Shakespeare or using different spelling.
With all this is mind it’s up to you to decide what you think is true. Do you really think a man with not much education could have written all the works he said he did, or is there someone who pretended to be Shakespeare the whole time. There is certainly evidence to both sides, but which one is more accurate?