To write or not to write: Experts doubt whether William Shakespeare actually wrote his plays

EVERYONE knows who wrote Hamlet, The Tempest and Twelfth Night, right? Well, it turns out we might all be wrong.
Exactly 393 years after his death, leading Shakespeare experts are calling for a definitive investigation to prove once and for all whether the Bard wrote his works.
Mark Rylance, the former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, and the actor Sir Derek Jacobi, are among 1,535 people who have so far signed a “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt” saying they believe others may have been responsible for penning Shakespeare’s most famous plays – potentially sending hundreds of years of literature teaching up in smoke and sending shockwaves through established academia.
Academics are split over the real authors of the plays, particularly Titus Andronicus, Henry VIII and Henry VI. Leading candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe and Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.
Those arguing against Shakespeare say that his lack of education and worldly experience would make it impossible for him to have the knowledge and vocabulary required for such extensive and detailed works.
Conspiracy theories as to whether Shakespeare wrote his most famous works are nothing new and have been rumbling around for centuries. Past doubters include Charlie Chaplin and Charles Dickens.
Now though attempts are now being made to clarify exactly who wrote what.
Mr Rylance, chairman of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust, voiced his doubts at a debate at Brunel University in London on Wednesday.
He said: “The simple way to put this is that I think you can be born with a genius in a certain area, be that writing, or music or painting, but you can't be born with the book learning or the life experience, you can't be born having travelled to Italy, or read books in all of the classical languages.
"You leave a trail in your life from where and how you pick these things up.
"With the man from Stratford we don't know how he gathered the life experience and book learning that's very, very apparent in the work attributed to him."
Mr Rylance and others who have signed the declaration are basing their evidence on testimony in the First Folio, a collection published in 1623 containing 36 of Shakespeare’s plays. It included previously unpublished works such as The Tempest, Twelfth Night and Macbeth.
“I subscribe to the group theory. I don't think anybody could do it on their own," Sir Derek Jacobi, who recently won a Laurence Olivier Award for his performance as Malvolio in Twelfth Night, said.
The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, home of the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt, said the point of it was the “legitimize the issue in academia so students, teachers and professors can feel free to pursue” what is widely viwed in academia as a taboo subject.
Dr William Leahy, head who runs the world’s only MA in Shakespeare authorship studies at Brunel, told me that academics were becoming ever more sceptical about the authenticity of Stratford-Upon-Avon’s favourite son.
He said: “Mainstream academics are constantly chipping away at the edifice that one man could have written all those plays.”
Shakespeare’s works have been run through sophisticated databases checking phraseology and word sequence and there is plenty there that doesn’t match up, he said, adding the caveat: “It doesn’t prove anything other than making a case to be sceptical.
“If one person wrote all those plays they would have to be familiar with five different languages and a detailed knowledge of the classics. Given his background it is unlikely Shakespeare was in that position.
“He had a limited education and didn’t go to university so it’s all very unlikely.”
After all these years it would be extraordinary if Britain's most beloved playwright turned out to be a fraud.