Who really wrote the works of William Shakespeare?

[Barrister]

I voted other:  it was a different guy who just happened to have the same name.

But I don't care all that much.  Shakespeare is over-rated.  When you examine them critically, you realize that his works are just a smash of clichés.

OK, so I'm not taking a definitive stance on this with a teacher, since I haven't read Shakespeare since I was in high school.

But aren't they cliches because Shakespeare made them so?

Or is that the joke you were going for?

I'm so confused.

Both of my statements are aged jokes that I still use anyway because they usually draw at least a smile.

Yeah I started writing, realized "hey wait a minute" and decided to keep going rather than just delete my post...

[HVC]

Shakespeare's plays sound less fancy in the original accent

[Josquius]

Not exactly something I'm super into but I do think the theories that SOME of Shakespeares works were by someone else hold validity.

Why?

as for the poll, I agree with Sav, the Marlowe option is the most entertaining, even if one of the most improbable.

There were a lot of "Shakespere works" accepted for a time in the centuries after his death that were later shown to be frauds - saying something is Shakespere sold better.
Given the range of stuff this covers it doesn't seem beyond belief some might have done a good enough job to slip into the accepted lists of works.

My doubts are less in the domain of a non noble couldn't have done this (though given how dangerous and disease ridden London was.... Jammy as shit)  and more the record is so spotty and quite under the radar of what most contemporaries paid attention to, that it's easy to become distorted.

[Sheilbh]

No there weren't.

The Shakespeare plays in the Folio (the first posthumous collection which also includes his poetry) and Quarto (mostly published before his death and some attributed to him plus others) are basically the plays we attribute to Shakespeare now. There are lengthy scholarly debates over the texts of the work but in terms of a Shakespearean "canon" there's not really that much. But it's known that his theatrical world would be one with collaboration so it's more about which and the extent to which other hands are involved (and to which Shakespeare's are in other Elizabethan and Jacobean texts).

There weren't loads of plays being attributed to Shakespeare in the centuries after his death, in part because he wasn't that fashionable after his death. In the short term Ben Jonson was significantly more popular and thought by some to be the greater writer (not least, Ben Jonson - who writes a fantastic poem praising Shakespeare as the greatest writer until then, while suggesting, perhaps, he is the only living writer capable of following in his footsteps - this is a strong poetic tradition of poets writing elegies or panegyrics on a dead poet to proclaim themselves the successor).

All through the 17th and 18th century various writers re-write Shakespeare because he doesn't follow the "rules" of drama (particularly Aristotlean unities) - and, especially with the tragedies, they're too sad. In Britain well into the 19th century and in the US right up until the Civil War, the most performed version version of King Lear has a happy ending. What starts to happen is that you have a "stage Shakespeare" who is not necessarily related to the texts (and has a very different canon of most performed to what we'd expect) and a "textual Shakespeare" who is read unabridged and unamended. He's largely just part of the repertoire through the 17th century, it's in the 18th that he becomes a "thing" but the canon of Shakespeare works is broadly well known and established at that point (as it had been broadly in texts published in his life and then very soon after his death by his friends).

Edit: Basically it's a mistake to back-project Shakespeare's reception now (or that of any individual text) into the past because their critical judgements were pretty different in lots of ways

[Josquius]

As said it's quite outside the domain of stuff that interests me. But this wiki page does suggest a lot of faux Shakespeare.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_apocrypha

[Sheilbh]

But that list gets the point - most of them are attributed to his company (some, possibly incorrectly) or collaborators and he may have been involved or not and it's not clear how much. And a lot of them from when he was still alive - there were basically big IP rivalries among London presses, with a lot of knock-off versions, which is why so soon after his death his friends put out effectively an "authorised" text.

The boundaries are a bit elastic because it was a collaborative world artistically - and also very ruthless in terms of publishers trying to cash in on the latest stage hit. And there are one or two texts like Pericles where there are arguments over as Sav says. But it's not because Shakespeare was uniquely popular and sold better - it's because authorship (and IP) was being invented. There's similar misattributions to Ben Jonson, Fletcher or Middleton.

It's maybe a bit like future generations trying to disentangle the iterations of the Sugababes, or show runners from the room. I think it's maybe a bit like the "auteur" and in this period writers asserted themselves as the dominant creative force in a theatrical company, as directors did in film? (And, in reality, both are highly collaborative.)

[PDH]

Obviously Shakespeare wrote his own stuff, however Grumbler was there looking over his shoulder to line edit.

[Syt]

Obviously Shakespeare wrote his own stuff, however Grumbler was there looking over his shoulder to line edit.

"'Critic'? 'Obscene'? 'Lonely'? You're just making up random words now, Will? "

https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-words/

(Yes, I know he likely didn't invent all or even most of those words but serves as (one of) the earliest sources of some words and helping popularize them afterwards. )

[Savonarola]

But you boil down the real believers' views and it's normally just the worst sort of classism. These great works of literature could not possibly have been written by the provincial son of a glovemaker, who went to his local grammar school and then made it big in London. Instead it always has to have secretly actually been an aristocrat or someone from the elite in some way or other. (Also many of them cite his "detailed knowledge" of other countries as a reason it had to be someone richer and well traveled rather than a pleb from the Midlands when there's literally a play that includes scenes on the beaches of Bohemia )

Which is why I was surprised to see it in an essay by Mark Twain; who didn't have formal schooling past the age of 11 and certainly wasn't from a cosmopolitan locale (though he did travel widely).  I saw from Wikipedia that Walt Whitman was also a Baconite, and his formal schooling also ended at age eleven, though I think he was from Brooklyn, which is at least more cosmopolitan than Hannibal, Missouri.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah. I wonder if there's a US-UK difference at play.

I read a recent article that Shakespeare didn't write his works in, I want to say, New York magazine (I think the proposal there was a Venetian woman and daughter of a merchant or diplomat of some sort). Part of it there seemed to slightly thrill at the radicalism of the idea that this particularly iconic part of the male, pale, stale, Anglo-canon was actually basically a kind of fraud. I wonder if there's something similar with say Twain and Whitman - especially as American writers at that point. It's an overturning of the old as they're building something new.

While I think any English person suggesting it is definitely just showing class bias

[grumbler]

Twain was just engaging in his usual contrarianism, IMO.  Not sure abut Whitman.

Twain called the anti-Baconites thugs, for instance. He wasn't serious (or at least completely serious) in Is Shakespeare Dead?.

[saskganesh]

It's absolutely never happened that someone with a lower or middle class background, someone with some sort of imperfect education, went to London and became an artistic innovator.

I voted Anne Hathaway, time traveler. She brings along Jimi Hendrix, and they do Othello. As a musical. Marty Feldman plays Iago.

[HVC]

I voted Anne Hathaway, time traveler. She brings along Jimi Hendrix, and they do Othello. As a musical. Marty Feldman plays Iago.