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1The Real Shakespeare
There never was an Elizabethan playwright named William Shakespeare. There was an Elizabethan actor by the name of William Shaxper or Shakspere born in Stratford-uponAvon, England. When academics speak of the historical William Shakespeare they are referring to this actor.
There is no evidence to show that William Shaxper was a writer. There are no original manuscripts of the plays or the poems, no letters and only six shaky signatures, all in dispute. Both his parents, John and Mary, were illiterate. His wife Anne Hathaway was illiterate. His children were illiterate, which would make Shaxper the only prominent writer in history whose children are known to have been illiterate.
The actor from Stratford never went to college and as far as can be determined never had any schooling. There has been an attempt by Stratfordians to surmise that William Shaxper attended a grammar school in Stratford. No records of this exist and Shaxper made no mention of this school in his will, a startling oversight if this grammar school was single-handedly responsible for creating perhaps the most literate, scholarly man of all time.
The lack of any letters written by William Shaxper is particularly significant. As a great writer, it is likely he would have written a large number. Voltaire's collected correspondence totals roughly 20,000 pieces. Shaxper's, or Shakespeare's collected correspondence totals exactly zero items.
2The Pen Name
In Elizabethan times, "Shake-spear" meant "to shake-a-spear." Shaking a spear is a reference to the Greek goddess of theatre, Pallas-Athena, also known as the "spear-shaker." This goddess is always depicted carrying a spear, hence the pen name, "Shake-spear."
Many plays, not credited to "William Shakespeare" appeared under the nom-de-plume "Shake-spear," including The London Prodigal, The Second Maiden's Tragedy, The Puritan, The Widow of Watling Street, The Comedy of George a Greene, Fair Em - the Miller's daughter, The Birth of Martin, The Arraignment of Paris and The Merrie Devil of Edmonton. Since these plays are not believed to have been written by the mythical William Shakespeare, clearly at least one other writer was using the pen name "Shake-spear."
3His Vocabulary
The works attributed to Shakespeare contain one of the largest vocabularies of any single English writer. John Milton's Paradise Lost, for example has about...