In this set of materials, the reading passage presents the possibility that Shakespeare was not a real author who wrote the plays. On the other hand, the professor points out that such possibilities are the result of poorly researched and he presents several counter evidence.
According to the reading passage, Edward De Vere was the real author who disguised his identity. Since the real Shakespeare would not have the chances to learn about classical writing, it is not possible for him to have written such noble writings. In addition, there is little documentation to link between Shakespeare and Stratford because signatures shown in his examples are look different from the original ones.
However, the professor claims that such results stemmed from poorly researched studies. First of all, he argues that the reading passage's hypothesis is wrong because it is conspiracy theory and no more than a sketch of the history. More importantly, in Shakespeare's era, there are many other playwrights that are impossible to explain who wrote the playwright. In addition, when is comes to signatures, in his time, playwrights were not considered to fall into literature, and thus authorship was not be considered to be important either because they were categorized into a popular genre, not a serious one. Lastly, there are many documents that refer to Shakespeare as a writer and actor. For example, the contemporary writer Ben Johnson also had referred him by the name. As shown above evidence, it is hard to find what motivated Shakespeare to use pseudonym instead of his real name. |