:dubious: If you mean Nathaniel Hawthorne, that would be a pretty neat trick, given that Mark Twain launched his literary career starting around 1865 and Hawthorne died in 1864.
Oh, so we’re supposed to believe that Mark Twain just coincidentally started his writing career right after Hawthorne died? Yeah, right! What are the odds of that?
#HuckleberryHawthorne
Wow, just a little bit outside!
Mark Twain was really Fenimore Cooper!
No, I’m Fenimore Cooper! And so’s my wife!
I seem to recall an argument that THE ODYSSEY wasn’t written by Homer, but by another man with the same name.
So maybe there were two William Shakespeares running around?
Honestly, this sounds like one of John Oliver’s How Is This Still A Thing? Whooooo Fuuuuuccckiiiing Caaaares? Can’t we just enjoy the plays? Or do what I do 98% of the time, which is to ignore them? It’s been a very long time since English Lit in college, and Troilus and Cressida just isn’t what I reach for when I want to relax in the evening after work.
To paraphrase Robert Heinlein, we can’t even agree who did what to whom in the Second World War, and that’s still in living memory. Does anyone really think they’re ever going to definitively unscrew what happened in 1602? Good luck. Be sure to write. And sign it “William Shakespeare”.
The argument here is that The Odyssey wasn’t written by a single individual at all, but was the product of generations of poets retelling the same cultural myth, gradually adding and removing elements over the course of several centuries.
People interested in history or literature, mostly. If you don’t care, you’re not required to participate.
Please. Robert Heinlein was a secret pen name for Gore Vidal, who didn’t want people to know he was writing something as de classe as science fiction.
Rather that Homer is the name traditionally given to the author, but with no evidence that this was his actual name. It isn’t even certain whether Homer was a single author or a collaborative work.
Feh. You all know the truth and refuse to say it, so I will: Theodor Adorno wrote all the Beatles’ songs as a Cultural Marxist assault on America.:
It’s all a plot. “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and walk you right into the gulag, “Imagine” there’s no religion except Stalinism, and the “Yellow Submarine” is creeping right up the East River with nuclear weapons to flatten Flatbush.
When he needed money in the early 1950s, Vidal wrote three mystery novels under the name of Edgar Box. They’re quite good, considering.
Considering what? He wrote 10,000 words a day from Monday through Saturday and then spent Sunday editing. He turned the manuscript in on Monday. He did this three separate times.
What kind of editing did he do when he could turn the words on like that? I don’t know for sure, but he would have edited de classe to déclassé, for example. 
Can you clarify? Are you using “written” as the work inked or composed? Because my understanding is that those events were not contemporary.
Sorry, composed, not written.
Did your post get inadvertently shortened? Since I think you meant to say *they are about a different man with the same name who could fly, raise the dead, magically multiply food, control the weather, etc. * it seems naive to conclude that this man is the same as the historical Jesus, whose most impressive party trick was turning bits of wood into a table.
I have not run across that many claims by people who don’t think they have grounds to make any claim about the identity of William Shakespeare. Not sure that would be worth a post in MPSIMS, much less Great Debates.
Me, I think a prolonged conspiracy to make some backwoods actor/poet into a superstar in Elizabethan London seems an unlikely hobby for academics capable of doing it. The absence of evidence seems evidence for skepticism. (and ridicule, given the tenor of academic politics at the time.)
Tris
A rose by any other name might smell like a misidentified pseudo rose, indistinguishable from real roses.
No, it isn’t. The evidence that it’s the guy from Avon is that they both used the same name. De Vere using a fake name is the less simple version, and thus needs to proven.
It is not remarkable at all that we don’t have somebody talking about Shakespeare writing before he wrote his stuff. That’s expected. He wasn’t famous yet, so why would anyone mention it? And he hadn’t written anything of note yet.
The null hypothesis is that the guy who wrote the plays is the guy whose name was put on them. It’s on you to prove that someone else did so.
If I may be a bit pedantic, the town William Shakespeare is from is Stratford-upon-Avon, and is commonly referred to just as Stratford.
(On another note, the propensity of septimus and other de Vere fans to call Shakespeare “Stratford” or “William of Stratford” is just wrong. His name was William Shakespeare; he was not called Stratford.)
The earliest hit I find for Shakespeare being referred to as the Bard of Avon is from accounts of the Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769.
Saying that he’s from Avon rather than Stratford may not be technically correct, but as an epithet it has a long history.