Then why do so many like Alexander Waugh have so many autistic aneurysms over it? Why are the de Vere people always fricking lunatics? Is it the classism? Because they got eternally BTFO?
They hate 'im coz they ain't 'im
It's one of those rare cases where adult men behave like high schoolers talking behind someone's back to discredit him
Probably because we don’t know much about Shakespeare’s life. Look at the persecution Elizabethan playwrights like Marlowe were facing. Is it surprising that Shakespeare wanted to live a quiet life? Whenever the life of an artist isn’t well known, there will always be a few that question authorship; see Homer for example. A conspiracy is always more intriguing than a mundane life so it gets traction because it is sensational
Most people weren't well-documented in Elizbethan england if they weren't nobles or upper class. John Webster or Thomas Middleton weren't well-documented either. Ben Johnson, the documented friend of Shakespeare, sung his praises after his death. That oxfordian site trys to downplay this by heinously misreading the introductory poem. Don't be fooled.
9 months ago
Anonymous
I’m not well versed on the lives of Middleton and Jonson, admittedly, and never read them, I just think people expect such a cultural icon as Shakespeare to have a well documented life. But no one at the time thought he would become an industry and one of the biggest figures in literature. The Oxfordian theory is moronic. Why would the author put hints in that it is his work? You don’t risk shit if you think your life would be endangered. And why would Shakespeare take this risk to have it attributed to him? You look hard enough, you can find anything you want. Stare at the Decameron long enough and I’m sure there is something like taking the third letter of every second page in the stories corresponding to Petrarch’s birthday, and you’ll find that he is the real author. Shakespeare wrote his own work. Conspiracygays need to come to terms with this
9 months ago
Anonymous
>You look hard enough, you can find anything you want.
Yes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_correlation
9 months ago
Anonymous
People looking for ciphers are moronic schizos. The "absence of documentations" people are less moronic but still frustrating. A lot of it comes down to "why didn't Shakespeare give his daughter a good education" or "why did Shakespeare's son-in-law not write about him" or "why did Shakespeare retire and return to Stratford 3 years before his death"? We'll never know, but conspiracists ignore "he was estranged" and "he was tired and wanted to enjoy his old age" in place of entirely unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.
9 months ago
Anonymous
I’ve always thought that Shakespeare being such a boring, human figure should be more inspiring than many people take it. There are lots of average joes that can be great artists if they reach down into themselves, and simply practice. You don’t have to be a scholar to be a great artist. It seems the dissonance of the towering figure of Shakespeare’s work and Shakespeare the man is too much for people to look at rationally
9 months ago
Anonymous
We should be glad he was "boring". As soon as an author gets an anecdote about him IQfyposters will latch onto it. Half of any thread about a specific work are people regurgitating facts about an authors life.
9 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah. IQfy is too much tmz for my liking. If you want to compare an author’s life or opinions to his work and expound upon it, that’s one thing. The issue is where that life of opinion loses all connection with the work and it basically becomes an off topic thread about said life or opinion
[...]
How little we seem to know comparatively about Shakespeare's life is certainly a big factor. Another big factor is that Shakespeare didn't really conceive of himself as an "author" in the same way that modern authors or especially how Ben Jonson did. Jonson printed a Folio of all his plays while he was alive, and in fact was the first modern playwright to do so, but there is no record that Shakespeare published any of his plays in his lifetime. Most playwrights at the time did not, plays were often published anonymously or surreptitiously by booksellers, because playwrights made their money through the theatre and plays were not especially considered as literary. The only thing Shakespeare probably did publish himself were his sonnets and/or Venus and Adonis because poems were viewed more highly. Jonson was unusual in changing this, in first conceiving of the playwright as a literary author, and then Shakespeare's Folio was published after his death partly in the model of Jonson's earlier one. But because of this Folio publication, it gives us the wrong impression in viewing his plays like Jonson's: we believe an "author" is behind them. Shakespeare never viewed himself as an "author" and very likely never expected to be remembered. There is so little reference to Shakespeare's life or the fact of his writing the plays in the plays themselves, unlike Jonson, because he never saw himself as an "author", he was a playwright. We know that he collaborated with other dramatists on several occasions and that it is likely plays were changed over the course of their runs. So when people become uncertain about Shakespeare's authorship it is in a sense because the plays have no "author" in the modern meaning of the term -- as in a single figure who is responsible for deciding what is the final product of the printed text. As far as we know there is not extant in the world a version of a single Shakespeare play that Shakespeare approved before it was printed.
Yeah, there are lots of gaps to fill in and people’s imaginations run wild. I think another factor is that Shakespeare lived at the right time. For some reason, the evolution of English has led many to point to the Elizabethan era, or around that time, as the high point in the English language. Burton, Shakespeare, Browne (a little after the first two but in the same general time frame), and others are often considered the best stylists. A lot of factors came together to create the legend of Shakespeare. He was probably a very perceptive man, witty, and a good wordsmith. There have been lots of writers, poets, and playwrights with those qualities but Shakespeare lived at the right time. That he is influential can’t be disputed, but I wonder what his stature would be if he wasn’t as influential? I don’t think it’s a case of the emperor wearing no clothes, but a lot of things needed to go right for him to be THE monumental figure of literature.
As an aside, has anyone read Van Doren’s NYRB book on Shakespeare? Or AC Bradley’s? Bloom’s? I’ve read the bards big plays a number of times but I’m not gonna lie, I struggle to read him in the beginning. The language, obsolete phrases, the character arcs, plot lines, poetry, philosophy, in a play takes me a few reads to really appreciate him. I can only usually focus on a couple things at a time. I’ve always had to brute force my way through a first reading. I always enjoy reading critiques and essays on his work though, and I find it fascinating. So much can be pulled from so few pages, and so many interpretations.
9 months ago
Anonymous
In history, even extremely powerful and famous people aren't actually well-documented during their lifetime. I think someone's first glance at history would make them inflate and overestimate how much 1st person literary evidence exists for most events.
9 months ago
Anonymous
I forget which one but I remember some major battle was recorded as a single entry in a book and just listed the dead and nobody believed it until archaeologists found the site.
9 months ago
Anonymous
They still aren't 100% sure of the exact location of the battle of Hastings, nor the sequence of events.
There were only four people with Lord Nelson when he died, yet we still manage to have two different versions of his last words
9 months ago
Anonymous
Before it was found in 1870, historians believed the Illiad was pure allegory and that Troy never existed.
9 months ago
Anonymous
Now they know the city existed but they think that gods don't exist. Baby steps.
Probably because we don’t know much about Shakespeare’s life. Look at the persecution Elizabethan playwrights like Marlowe were facing. Is it surprising that Shakespeare wanted to live a quiet life? Whenever the life of an artist isn’t well known, there will always be a few that question authorship; see Homer for example. A conspiracy is always more intriguing than a mundane life so it gets traction because it is sensational
How little we seem to know comparatively about Shakespeare's life is certainly a big factor. Another big factor is that Shakespeare didn't really conceive of himself as an "author" in the same way that modern authors or especially how Ben Jonson did. Jonson printed a Folio of all his plays while he was alive, and in fact was the first modern playwright to do so, but there is no record that Shakespeare published any of his plays in his lifetime. Most playwrights at the time did not, plays were often published anonymously or surreptitiously by booksellers, because playwrights made their money through the theatre and plays were not especially considered as literary. The only thing Shakespeare probably did publish himself were his sonnets and/or Venus and Adonis because poems were viewed more highly. Jonson was unusual in changing this, in first conceiving of the playwright as a literary author, and then Shakespeare's Folio was published after his death partly in the model of Jonson's earlier one. But because of this Folio publication, it gives us the wrong impression in viewing his plays like Jonson's: we believe an "author" is behind them. Shakespeare never viewed himself as an "author" and very likely never expected to be remembered. There is so little reference to Shakespeare's life or the fact of his writing the plays in the plays themselves, unlike Jonson, because he never saw himself as an "author", he was a playwright. We know that he collaborated with other dramatists on several occasions and that it is likely plays were changed over the course of their runs. So when people become uncertain about Shakespeare's authorship it is in a sense because the plays have no "author" in the modern meaning of the term -- as in a single figure who is responsible for deciding what is the final product of the printed text. As far as we know there is not extant in the world a version of a single Shakespeare play that Shakespeare approved before it was printed.
I'll ask this again: Why do so many of you seem pressed over this? Shouldn't this be a matter of genuine intellectual curiosity? We're talking about the greatest literary artist in the English language. If he could have been someone else entirely, or a team of two or more people, that seems academically significant. So far, this just seems like a team dynamic, where Stratfordians call Oxfordians conspiracy theorists and Oxfordians call Stratfordians gullible gays. I should expect more of you.
Marlowe wrote the plays. Stylometry shows shakespeare and marlowe are indistinguishable.
ron maimon wrote some extremely convincing posts about this like a decade ago
1/3rd of Shakespeares corpus came out after De Vere died. One a year, the exact same pace as they did before he died.
Poetry was popular in the royal court. Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard were both high ranking aristocrats. Regardless of the plays, there would be no reason to publish the sonnets under Shakespeare's name.
Your move Stratfordians! De Vere anglicanly left a clue in the front matter of The Merry Wives of Windsor. All you need to do is play american football through college and indulge in hallucinogens and the truth becomes clear!
All the authorship stuff is like this, drawing masonic symbols across title pages and numerology and cryptography. Interspersed with hysterical screeching about how th author is persecuted by evil Stratfordians. It looks like it's become a subculture for a handful of academics who are obsessed just for the sake of it.
The gematria and geometries in the published works and plaques and statues commemorating him after his death are too numerous and consistent to be coincidence. This doesn't prove or disprove his identity of course, but it does lead to the real conspiracy: why were Shakespeare's long-lived contemporaries so obsessed with masonic games, and why did they insist on embedding so many riddles in his memorials?
all of that is random made up nonsense by autists that think only they’ve discovered the secrets to the universe and all that.
9 months ago
Anonymous
no, all of it is very much premeditated to prey on the minds of autists. it doesn't have to be correct to not be random
9 months ago
Anonymous
There's definitely elements of that.
They still aren't 100% sure of the exact location of the battle of Hastings, nor the sequence of events.
There were only four people with Lord Nelson when he died, yet we still manage to have two different versions of his last words
My favorite one is when the autists tried to deny that Alexander the Great existed because there wasn't enough proof.
LOL the symbols are openly in your face. it is right there telling you it's de vere. you people are as brain dead as the morons who took the vaccine because the guy on tv told you. dumb fricks forever and always.
LOL the symbols are openly in your face. it is right there telling you it's de vere. you people are as brain dead as the morons who took the vaccine because the guy on tv told you. dumb fricks forever and always.
No, lower middle class types are incapable of reaching such heights. Best they can do is ascend to Dickens tier.
Of course he didn't. Stratfordians are complete moronic.
Just read picrel and you'll come to the conclusion that De Vere is the most likely culprit.
Your move Stratfordians! De Vere anglicanly left a clue in the front matter of The Merry Wives of Windsor. All you need to do is play american football through college and indulge in hallucinogens and the truth becomes clear!
I'll ask this again: Why do so many of you seem pressed over this? Shouldn't this be a matter of genuine intellectual curiosity? We're talking about the greatest literary artist in the English language. If he could have been someone else entirely, or a team of two or more people, that seems academically significant. So far, this just seems like a team dynamic, where Stratfordians call Oxfordians conspiracy theorists and Oxfordians call Stratfordians gullible gays. I should expect more of you.
>Shouldn't this be a matter of genuine intellectual curiosity?
He’s literally the most talked about individual writer in history. This is the genuine intellectual curiosity you midwit.
Shut up you big baby. “Hurr durr why don’t you discuss it the way I want you to discuss it?! Come on guys I don’t like it when you discuss literature like that! Listen to me and my ideas! Ugh I hate you guys!”
9 months ago
Anonymous
There are posters on this board as deranged and thoughtless as this. Sad!
his plays differ so much in qualities to each other that anyone who thinks they were all written by the same guy is just low iq loser, those same people probably also believe the one who wrote job is the same as the one who wrote the proverbs
There is evidence that Shakespeare was enrolled in a Grammar School, one of the best in the country at the time. Shakespeare's family was not that poor. His father was even mayor of Stratford for some time, and his mother was from a well-known rural family. It's probable (almost certain) that William went to the Grammar School for quite some time, and do you know what they taught at schools that time? The name “Grammar Schools” already says a lot. Yeah, that’s right: grammar, especially Latin grammar. History and the Sciences were hardly a subject of teaching, but Latin and English, figures of speech, rhetoric, oratory, versification, memorization of long passages of classical literature and biblical literature, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Seneca, the Psalms, the Book of Job, metaphors and similes – that was the main thing kids learned at that time. It is probable that a teenage bot in Elizabethan England schools was having a better education to invest in a poetry career than people on literature courses in Ivy League Universities in our own time.
There are several mentions of Shakespeare made by contemporaries, as well as an overtly offensive mention, which portrays a man who has just arrived from the countryside, trying to do all sorts of jobs at once (ie, a very palpable definition of a real person):
>"... for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is able to bomb out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fact totum, is in his own concept the onely Shake-scene in a countrey."
Other poets of great renown also had humble origins, such as Marlowe and Ben Jonson. It was not an uncommon phenomena.
Many of Shakespeare's published works have his name on the cover.
Shakespeare's plays show the use of Yorkshire dialect and the dialect of the countryside, as well as references to activities typical of the craft of leather craftsmen and the production of gloves, bags and other items that use sheepskin (the profession of Shakespeare's father) .
Also, his plays show a consistent style, that changes from work to work and period to period, but whose bones and sinews are the same. It’s a densely metaphorical style, much bolder and even exaggerated than what we find in any other playwright or poet of the time. Shakespeare had so much fertility with imagery that he had to learn how to curb his own thirst to keep pilling image on the head of image. The same feature - a constant use of metaphors to express ideas and thoughts - happen in all plays, showing that most of them were the work of the same man (excerpt from works that we know were the result of collaboration).
If you want someone to bet your money as the author of the plays bet on the bald gentlemen from Stratford.
Yes
Then why do so many like Alexander Waugh have so many autistic aneurysms over it? Why are the de Vere people always fricking lunatics? Is it the classism? Because they got eternally BTFO?
They hate 'im coz they ain't 'im
It's one of those rare cases where adult men behave like high schoolers talking behind someone's back to discredit him
They hate us cuz they anus.
Probably because we don’t know much about Shakespeare’s life. Look at the persecution Elizabethan playwrights like Marlowe were facing. Is it surprising that Shakespeare wanted to live a quiet life? Whenever the life of an artist isn’t well known, there will always be a few that question authorship; see Homer for example. A conspiracy is always more intriguing than a mundane life so it gets traction because it is sensational
Most people weren't well-documented in Elizbethan england if they weren't nobles or upper class. John Webster or Thomas Middleton weren't well-documented either. Ben Johnson, the documented friend of Shakespeare, sung his praises after his death. That oxfordian site trys to downplay this by heinously misreading the introductory poem. Don't be fooled.
I’m not well versed on the lives of Middleton and Jonson, admittedly, and never read them, I just think people expect such a cultural icon as Shakespeare to have a well documented life. But no one at the time thought he would become an industry and one of the biggest figures in literature. The Oxfordian theory is moronic. Why would the author put hints in that it is his work? You don’t risk shit if you think your life would be endangered. And why would Shakespeare take this risk to have it attributed to him? You look hard enough, you can find anything you want. Stare at the Decameron long enough and I’m sure there is something like taking the third letter of every second page in the stories corresponding to Petrarch’s birthday, and you’ll find that he is the real author. Shakespeare wrote his own work. Conspiracygays need to come to terms with this
>You look hard enough, you can find anything you want.
Yes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_correlation
People looking for ciphers are moronic schizos. The "absence of documentations" people are less moronic but still frustrating. A lot of it comes down to "why didn't Shakespeare give his daughter a good education" or "why did Shakespeare's son-in-law not write about him" or "why did Shakespeare retire and return to Stratford 3 years before his death"? We'll never know, but conspiracists ignore "he was estranged" and "he was tired and wanted to enjoy his old age" in place of entirely unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.
I’ve always thought that Shakespeare being such a boring, human figure should be more inspiring than many people take it. There are lots of average joes that can be great artists if they reach down into themselves, and simply practice. You don’t have to be a scholar to be a great artist. It seems the dissonance of the towering figure of Shakespeare’s work and Shakespeare the man is too much for people to look at rationally
We should be glad he was "boring". As soon as an author gets an anecdote about him IQfyposters will latch onto it. Half of any thread about a specific work are people regurgitating facts about an authors life.
Yeah. IQfy is too much tmz for my liking. If you want to compare an author’s life or opinions to his work and expound upon it, that’s one thing. The issue is where that life of opinion loses all connection with the work and it basically becomes an off topic thread about said life or opinion
Yeah, there are lots of gaps to fill in and people’s imaginations run wild. I think another factor is that Shakespeare lived at the right time. For some reason, the evolution of English has led many to point to the Elizabethan era, or around that time, as the high point in the English language. Burton, Shakespeare, Browne (a little after the first two but in the same general time frame), and others are often considered the best stylists. A lot of factors came together to create the legend of Shakespeare. He was probably a very perceptive man, witty, and a good wordsmith. There have been lots of writers, poets, and playwrights with those qualities but Shakespeare lived at the right time. That he is influential can’t be disputed, but I wonder what his stature would be if he wasn’t as influential? I don’t think it’s a case of the emperor wearing no clothes, but a lot of things needed to go right for him to be THE monumental figure of literature.
As an aside, has anyone read Van Doren’s NYRB book on Shakespeare? Or AC Bradley’s? Bloom’s? I’ve read the bards big plays a number of times but I’m not gonna lie, I struggle to read him in the beginning. The language, obsolete phrases, the character arcs, plot lines, poetry, philosophy, in a play takes me a few reads to really appreciate him. I can only usually focus on a couple things at a time. I’ve always had to brute force my way through a first reading. I always enjoy reading critiques and essays on his work though, and I find it fascinating. So much can be pulled from so few pages, and so many interpretations.
In history, even extremely powerful and famous people aren't actually well-documented during their lifetime. I think someone's first glance at history would make them inflate and overestimate how much 1st person literary evidence exists for most events.
I forget which one but I remember some major battle was recorded as a single entry in a book and just listed the dead and nobody believed it until archaeologists found the site.
They still aren't 100% sure of the exact location of the battle of Hastings, nor the sequence of events.
There were only four people with Lord Nelson when he died, yet we still manage to have two different versions of his last words
Before it was found in 1870, historians believed the Illiad was pure allegory and that Troy never existed.
Now they know the city existed but they think that gods don't exist. Baby steps.
Does allegory exist anon?
Yes, he did, obviously. He's so good, though, that he creates this weird kind of lunacy in people that causes them to question his authorship
How little we seem to know comparatively about Shakespeare's life is certainly a big factor. Another big factor is that Shakespeare didn't really conceive of himself as an "author" in the same way that modern authors or especially how Ben Jonson did. Jonson printed a Folio of all his plays while he was alive, and in fact was the first modern playwright to do so, but there is no record that Shakespeare published any of his plays in his lifetime. Most playwrights at the time did not, plays were often published anonymously or surreptitiously by booksellers, because playwrights made their money through the theatre and plays were not especially considered as literary. The only thing Shakespeare probably did publish himself were his sonnets and/or Venus and Adonis because poems were viewed more highly. Jonson was unusual in changing this, in first conceiving of the playwright as a literary author, and then Shakespeare's Folio was published after his death partly in the model of Jonson's earlier one. But because of this Folio publication, it gives us the wrong impression in viewing his plays like Jonson's: we believe an "author" is behind them. Shakespeare never viewed himself as an "author" and very likely never expected to be remembered. There is so little reference to Shakespeare's life or the fact of his writing the plays in the plays themselves, unlike Jonson, because he never saw himself as an "author", he was a playwright. We know that he collaborated with other dramatists on several occasions and that it is likely plays were changed over the course of their runs. So when people become uncertain about Shakespeare's authorship it is in a sense because the plays have no "author" in the modern meaning of the term -- as in a single figure who is responsible for deciding what is the final product of the printed text. As far as we know there is not extant in the world a version of a single Shakespeare play that Shakespeare approved before it was printed.
Marlowe wrote the plays. Stylometry shows shakespeare and marlowe are indistinguishable.
ron maimon wrote some extremely convincing posts about this like a decade ago
Marlowe sucks ass
no shit butthole, he got better the more he wrote.
Yea /thread
1/3rd of Shakespeares corpus came out after De Vere died. One a year, the exact same pace as they did before he died.
Poetry was popular in the royal court. Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard were both high ranking aristocrats. Regardless of the plays, there would be no reason to publish the sonnets under Shakespeare's name.
No one wrote them, they are self-originated
my dad thinks he didn't so I think that he did
My favorite theory was that he could have been a woman
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/who-is-shakespeare-emilia-bassano/588076/
This is no more or less idiotic than any of the other theories, and is substantially more entertaining.
Yes he wrote it. And he was good. Next question.
Your move Stratfordians! De Vere anglicanly left a clue in the front matter of The Merry Wives of Windsor. All you need to do is play american football through college and indulge in hallucinogens and the truth becomes clear!
Is that real?
Yes. What of it? I thought IQfy was supposed to be the high iq board?
>clearly stating
All the authorship stuff is like this, drawing masonic symbols across title pages and numerology and cryptography. Interspersed with hysterical screeching about how th author is persecuted by evil Stratfordians. It looks like it's become a subculture for a handful of academics who are obsessed just for the sake of it.
The gematria and geometries in the published works and plaques and statues commemorating him after his death are too numerous and consistent to be coincidence. This doesn't prove or disprove his identity of course, but it does lead to the real conspiracy: why were Shakespeare's long-lived contemporaries so obsessed with masonic games, and why did they insist on embedding so many riddles in his memorials?
all of that is random made up nonsense by autists that think only they’ve discovered the secrets to the universe and all that.
no, all of it is very much premeditated to prey on the minds of autists. it doesn't have to be correct to not be random
There's definitely elements of that.
My favorite one is when the autists tried to deny that Alexander the Great existed because there wasn't enough proof.
LOL the symbols are openly in your face. it is right there telling you it's de vere. you people are as brain dead as the morons who took the vaccine because the guy on tv told you. dumb fricks forever and always.
Maybe they were bumming. That was all the rage. And they both look like ragers.
Shakespeare = Francis Bacon
shakespeare was a fraud, actually the plays were written a black trans woman by the name of wakanda shanique
He wrote them and was Catholic. All conspiracies invented by jealous Prot and Freemason tards.
Of course he didn't. Stratfordians are complete moronic.
Just read picrel and you'll come to the conclusion that De Vere is the most likely culprit.
Both Diana Price and you don’t know anything about anything. A bunch of classist weirdos.
No, lower middle class types are incapable of reaching such heights. Best they can do is ascend to Dickens tier.
fyi this thread is samegayged by the stratfor autist
it is SO obviously de vere that there is no need to even debate it.
Talk about samegayging
I'll ask this again: Why do so many of you seem pressed over this? Shouldn't this be a matter of genuine intellectual curiosity? We're talking about the greatest literary artist in the English language. If he could have been someone else entirely, or a team of two or more people, that seems academically significant. So far, this just seems like a team dynamic, where Stratfordians call Oxfordians conspiracy theorists and Oxfordians call Stratfordians gullible gays. I should expect more of you.
>Shouldn't this be a matter of genuine intellectual curiosity?
He’s literally the most talked about individual writer in history. This is the genuine intellectual curiosity you midwit.
You're proving my point.
Shut up you big baby. “Hurr durr why don’t you discuss it the way I want you to discuss it?! Come on guys I don’t like it when you discuss literature like that! Listen to me and my ideas! Ugh I hate you guys!”
There are posters on this board as deranged and thoughtless as this. Sad!
Continuing to samegay, I see.
>complains about the discussion
>adds nothing to the discussion
Sad. Many such cases.
his plays differ so much in qualities to each other that anyone who thinks they were all written by the same guy is just low iq loser, those same people probably also believe the one who wrote job is the same as the one who wrote the proverbs
Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
There is evidence that Shakespeare was enrolled in a Grammar School, one of the best in the country at the time. Shakespeare's family was not that poor. His father was even mayor of Stratford for some time, and his mother was from a well-known rural family. It's probable (almost certain) that William went to the Grammar School for quite some time, and do you know what they taught at schools that time? The name “Grammar Schools” already says a lot. Yeah, that’s right: grammar, especially Latin grammar. History and the Sciences were hardly a subject of teaching, but Latin and English, figures of speech, rhetoric, oratory, versification, memorization of long passages of classical literature and biblical literature, Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Seneca, the Psalms, the Book of Job, metaphors and similes – that was the main thing kids learned at that time. It is probable that a teenage bot in Elizabethan England schools was having a better education to invest in a poetry career than people on literature courses in Ivy League Universities in our own time.
There are several mentions of Shakespeare made by contemporaries, as well as an overtly offensive mention, which portrays a man who has just arrived from the countryside, trying to do all sorts of jobs at once (ie, a very palpable definition of a real person):
>"... for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is able to bomb out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fact totum, is in his own concept the onely Shake-scene in a countrey."
Other poets of great renown also had humble origins, such as Marlowe and Ben Jonson. It was not an uncommon phenomena.
Many of Shakespeare's published works have his name on the cover.
Shakespeare's plays show the use of Yorkshire dialect and the dialect of the countryside, as well as references to activities typical of the craft of leather craftsmen and the production of gloves, bags and other items that use sheepskin (the profession of Shakespeare's father) .
Also, his plays show a consistent style, that changes from work to work and period to period, but whose bones and sinews are the same. It’s a densely metaphorical style, much bolder and even exaggerated than what we find in any other playwright or poet of the time. Shakespeare had so much fertility with imagery that he had to learn how to curb his own thirst to keep pilling image on the head of image. The same feature - a constant use of metaphors to express ideas and thoughts - happen in all plays, showing that most of them were the work of the same man (excerpt from works that we know were the result of collaboration).
If you want someone to bet your money as the author of the plays bet on the bald gentlemen from Stratford.