T.G.G. Moogly
Traditional Atheist
Yes, no doubt. Some of the material in the plays is so-so.
And yes, that the Stratford bloke would do that would be silly.
It is established that there was collaboration. Yes! Yes! Lol. Now the voice in my head sounds like some actress in a film from the forties:
Yes! Yes! Alright, damn you! I killed her! And I would kill her again! Now kiss me, you fool! (violins, credits...)
With De Vere we see a normal literary trajectory. With the Stratford man we embrace a miracle.
Okay. So where are we at?
I agree we should doubt the Stratford Man as sole author, perhaps as an author at all. But I am by no means persuaded that he was illiterate. For one, he would have to have had someone read the parts to him in order to memorize them. Makes me wonder why an illiterate person would want to become an actor.
ETA: by the way, I am still not sold on two other major issues:
I don't think the variance in the signatures is terribly strong evidence that TSM was illiterate, for reasons posited by orthodoxists, and my own (which I will explain).
I don't think that no mention of books in the wlil is a big issue (which I will explain).
And of course, any one or two of those numerous points demonstrates nothing. Some of the books he would have had to use, however, were rare and expensive. Why would he not have willed them? They were far more valuable than the other items in his will, they were not nickel paperbacks.
And of course there is nothing in his life that indicates he was a writer unless we suppose he wrote the Shakespeare Canon, something that was not attributed to him until seven years after his death. There are no letters at all, nothing! No one ever mentioned him being a writer and there is nothing written from him. All we have are poems and plays with the name William Shakespeare, many of which it is agreed were not written by the person that wrote the Shakespeare Canon. This is just another red flag.