Ok, quick question.
Was William Shakespear’s real name Sir Francias Bacon, or William shakespear?
Oh, to be young and a newbie again.
Oh, waitress! I’d like a side order of Bacon with my Urban Legend, please. Either Sir Francis or Delia will do, thank you. :wally
His real name was William Shakespeare. There is, however, some controversy about whomever may have written some (or all) of Shakespeare’s work. Francis Bacon was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and some claim it was him who wrote all that lovely stuff about daggers and Danish Princes.
Others other than Bacon have been proposed as the real author. One with much evidence for it is a person hinted at in one of the sonnets and who was an earl. The theory is that a member of the royal court could not write plays and poems, so he had to make his identity a secret. Unfortunately, I cannot recall his name right now, but it is actually spelled out in a sonnet, if you read between the lines. I’m sure some one will pop up with the name.
or Shake-speare or Shakspeare or Shaxberd or Shakespere or Shak-speare or Shakspear or Shakspere or Shaksper or Schaksp. or Shakespear or Shakespheare or Something Completely Different 
Actually, Bacon is only one of the many people proposed as a possible ‘real’ Shakespeare. The Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe, and even Queen Elizabeth have all been suggested as possible ‘real’ Shakespeares.
The theory here is pretty simple. Shakespeare’s plays reputedly show a strong understanding of the at-the-time law, medicine, science, and political affairs; this is something that many people refused to believe a London commoner would be able to gather such a grasp of. Therefore, the ‘real’ author had to be a scholar and nobleman, and used Shakespeare as a foil because being a known playwright would be a horrible scandal for a person of nobility. Not to mention the possible imprisonment and execution should the monarch decide your play was in any way seditious. In addition, little is actually known about Shakespeare himself; you’d think the greatest playwright of his time (if not all time) would have a bit more written about him by his contemporaries.
Now, as for whether it’s true that Shakespeare the playwright wasn’t really Shakspear the actor- there’s no real solid evidence that anyone else wrote the plays. There are theories, most of which are based upon persons who went through the kind of education it is assumed ‘Shakespeare’ would have needed to write as correctly as he did, as well as coincidences of people living through experiences that would become plot devices of various plays (for example, the notorious ‘wife switch’, where a man goes off to have an affair and actually sleeps with his wife (who is disguised) reportedly actually happened to the Earl of Oxford).
The operative word, of course, being ‘reputedly.’
RAWisSYDNEY, if you’re interested, check out
http://www.clark.net/pub/tross/ws/will.html for a pretty
thorough debunking of the whole thing.
The earl of Oxford was the one I had in mind. His name, IIRC, was D’Arcy. There are actually two lines in one sonnet which spells out that the author’s name as the earl, but I just can’t recall what they are.
That’s an excellent cite, bup! Thanks!
I have heard of no reputable scholar who believes that Shakespeare was not the author of his own plays. Most that voice the different theories as to authorship are what would pass for literary conspiracy theorists.
I’m still waiting for von Danakin to come out with “Plays of the Gods” where he conclusively proves that all of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets were authored by visitors from other planets because no one on earth in the 1500s and 1600s had the knowledge to pull it off without extra-terrestrial help.
Smithsonian magazine had an excellent article about the supposed authors of Shakespeare’s works about five or six years ago. I will try to find it and e-mail it. I also compliment bup’s citation.
This is not to say that Shakespeare was above liberally “borrowing” from friends and competitors alike.
Actually, his name was Edward de Vere.
Quoth TV Time:
Of course, to properly appreciate Shakespeare, you must read him in the original Klingon.
But seriously, the evidence for Edward de Vere or the like is generally along the lines of “one of Shakespeare’s sonnets contains the letters e, d, and v, in that order, which is obviously a coded reference to the author”. If you think that Shakespeare showed an uncommon knowledge of “noble” matters, just remember: Shakespeare’s company was “The King’s Men”, meaning that their personal patron was none other than the King himself (and later, the Queen), and they played a great many command performances for the monarchy. Some of the plays (Twelfth Night, for instance) are believed to have been written at the direct request of the monarch. There’s also the small matter that all of the noble candidates did, in fact, write under their own names, and some of it rather biting satire. There was no need for a pen name to protect them from royal ire.
Bravo, Chronos. Among the many fallacies assumed by the “Shakespeare isn’t the author” folks is the idea that ones school and background tell you all about a guy. By their logic, I couldn’t possibly be a webmaster at a college simply because I never took a single course on web design. Feh!
Saying Shakespeare couldn’t have known about court intrigues is like saying I couldn’t have known anything about Clinton and Monica Lewinski because I wasn’t in the Washington inner circle. Court gossip went all around London in Shakespeare’s time, and it wasn’t just the nobles spreading it (even excluding Shakespeare’s connection).
There are other fallacies. Shakespeare only went to grammar school, so he couldn’t know Latin and Greek, they say (ignoring the fact that you DID learn Latin and Greek in Grammar School in Shakespeare’s time). They also assume that a playwright writes the play, he just drops it off at the theater and goes on his way, when actually playwrights always are a part of the staging process.
The salient fact is what they are positing is unique in the history of literature: an author who hides behind a living person’s pseudonym (only a handful of examples of that) and that this deception isn’t even suspected until centuries after the author’s death. They can’t even name another case of this precise thing happening. Because this is such an unusual event, it requires unusually strong proof. And the fact is, no one has ever come up with anything that can truly be called “proof” (a document or commentary, for instance) – just speculation.
Also, if someone else wrote Shakespeare because they were afraid of consequences, then they are a coward. It’s hard to imagine the writer of the plays being so craven.
I don’t remember the sonnet number. I couldn’t even remember deVere’s name, but it’s more than a coded reference to a few letters. deVere’s name is actually spelled out, but in a context of two words that have to be grouped, and the lines state that he is the author.
Sort of.
It’s “Every word doth almost speak my name”
They claim “Every” is “e. vere.” So you have to drop
the ‘de’ and pretend like the ‘y’ is an ‘e’ and then
you have
“‘Something close to Edward de Vere’ word doth almost speak my name.”
I don’t remember the sonnet number either. But this is
penny-ante stuff. The Baconians have all kinds of cool
ciphers. And the Marlovians have spies!
I should have been more precise. The reference that’s usually cited is as follows: You start by taking a certain triangle that’s supposedly associated with Shakespeare (we know it’s associated with Shakespeare because there was an anonymous book around the same time that sort of vaguely contained that triangle in some of the illustrations). You then superimpose that triangle over the text of the poem (not actually a sonnet, by the way… I believe it’s the one where he warns graverobbers against disturbing his bones), at a certain size and in a certain font. The triangle then covers letters that spell out “e d v man is he”. The words “man”, “is” and “he” are intact in the original work, but the e, d, and v are parts of other words. It’s similar to the Bible Code, really: If you take a large enough body of text (like the entire Old Testament, or the complete works of Shakespeare), and look at enough letter patterns, you’re sure to find some things that look like messages.
Another such play was “The Merry Wives of Windsor” said to be written when Queen Elizabeth expressed a desire for a play depicting Sir John Falstaff in love.
Here’s a thread where we kicked this around before:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=44424
In that thread, I made a post about a passage which appeared in Issac Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, where a rival author criticized a mere actor for having the effrontery to write plays. Here it is again:
Obviously, this would seem to indicate that Shakespeare’s contemporaries thought it was the actor William Shakespeare, and not some “higher born” figure, that was responsible for the plays.
Ben Jonson wrote a poem called “To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us” You can read it here.
This is pretty much an eye-witness account, right? Can we put this one to bed now?
Francis Bacon? As in the co-founder of the scientific method? Wow, he must have been a busy person.
Roger. Over and out.