Along the same lines, I have my doubts that Johnny Cash wrote Folsom Prison Blues. I mean, Johnny Cash writes as though he’s been disgraced and has been imprisoned for essentially the rest of his life. Now clearly we know that can’t be the case since he was never in prison and he certainly never killed a man in Reno just to watch him die. I don’t know what to make of this, except the only logical conclusion–Cash didn’t write the song! How could he even imagine being so lonesome in prison with nothing but the train to listen for? It gets even more suspicious when you compare it to other, earlier country songs–specifically ones about trains and ones about prison. Surely with other song writers (especially people like Hank Williams) writing on these themes, Johnny Cash would never waste his time?
Seriously though, it’s kind of a waste of time to try to read something and make assumptions about the writer’s life based on that. The speaker in the Sonnets is not necessarily Shakespeare. There’s been a lot of claims that the writer we call Shakespeare is really somebody else, but nobody has ever been able to prove it because you need to have more solid proof than “The speaker in the Sonnet doesn’t sound like what I think I know of the author.”