Happy Birthday to Will Shakespeare in The AnswerBank: Books & Authors

I wonder whether it wasn't all some Stuart publicity thing - catchy date, catchy geezer.
As a matter of interest do you think he wrote the plays and sonnets? or had a silent partner?

Kiki-frog

A bit of a bummer he died on this day as well. I like to think he was enjoying his birthday party at the time.

VHG

Nobody has any idea when he was born, only when he was baptized.

Working back from his baptize date gives a possible birth date, but nobody really knows.

sandyRoe

For a man with little Latin & less Greek he seemed to have an extensive knowledge of classics.
Makes you wonder.

Mosaic

That's kind of the side I come down on Sandy. I'm sure he had the life experience to organise and write the knockabout humour and the fight scenes, but so much of the content is aimed at bleeding-edge fashion and intellectualism of the early 1600s, which your average son of Stratford had no access to. I don't think any less of the works - just don't think Shakey did them.

Mattk

A heck of a lot of output in a relatively short space of time.

VHG

>>>which your average son of Stratford had no access to.

He was probably educated at the local grammer school in Latin and the "classics".

And when he left Stratford he had a number of "lost years" between 1585 and 1592 so who knows what he was doing during that time.

He also came to London and wrote his best plays there so he must also have been influenced there.

Also remember many of his plays were "reconstructed" when the First Folio was produced, years after his death, so who knows what was "added" at that time, as no definitive scripts were left for many of the plays when he died.