XIV открытые Шегреновские ученические чтения

Направление: Лингвистика

Название темы: «Shakespeare`s Authorship Question»

Автор работы: Томаева Арина Аслановна, 9 класс

Место выполнения работы: МБОУ СОШ №26

Научный руководитель:

Тибилова Индиана Борисовна, учитель английского языка

Владикавказ 2024 г.

Content

Annotation ………………………………………………… p.3

Introduction ………………………………………………… p.4

Case against Shakespeare’s authorship ………………….… p.4

Education and literacy……………………………………… p.5

Lack of documentary evidence…………………………… p.6

Circumstances of Shakespeare's death…………………… p.6

Case for Shakespeare’s authorship…………….……………p.7

Historical evidence………………………………………….p.8

Shakespeare's death—the historical perspective……………p.10

Evidence for Shakespeare's authorship from his works…….p.11

Practical part………………………………………………..p.12

Conclusions………………………………………… p.15

Bibliography……………………………………………… p.16

Annotation.

Shakespeare authorship question

is the argument over whether someone other

than William Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him. Shakespeare's authorship was first

questioned in the middle of the 19th century, when perception of Shakespeare as the greatest

writer of all time had become widespread. Although the idea has attracted much public

interest, all but a few Shakespeare scholars and literary historians consider it a fringe belief and

for the most part disregard it except to rebut or disparage the claims.

The tasks: I am very fond of Shakespeare`s poetry and reread his dramas and sonnets

many times getting great pleasure and inspiration. The debates about the Shakespeare`s

authorship have not stopped yet. A lot of articles are appearing from time to time about this

question which arises new discussions. As Shakespeare is my favorite author I decided to make

it clear for myself and tried to analyze the question regarding different points of view and

making my own conclusions.

The methods of investigation: 1.Theoretical 2.Analysis of literature. 3. Analysis of the

sites of the internet. 4. Analysis of the articles from the newspapers and journals. 5. Presentation.

3

Introduction

The Shakespeare authorship question is argument that someone other than William

Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works attributed to him. Anti-Stratfordians—a

collective term for adherents of the various alternative-authorship theories—believe that

Shakespeare of Stratford was a front to shield the identity of the real author or authors, who for

some reason did not want or could not accept public credit. Although the idea has attracted much

public interest, all but a few Shakespeare scholars and literary historians consider it a fringe

belief, and for the most part acknowledge it only to rebut or disparage the claims.

Shakespeare's

authorship

was

first

questioned

in

the

middle

of

the

19th

century, when adulation of Shakespeare as the greatest writer of all time had become

widespread. Shakespeare's biography, particularly his humble origins and obscure life, seemed

incompatible with his poetic eminence and his reputation for genius, arousing suspicion that

Shakespeare might not have written the works attributed to him.

Supporters of alternative candidates argue that William Shakespeare lacked the education,

aristocratic sensibility, or familiarity with the royal court that they say is apparent in the works.

Those Shakespeare scholars who have responded to such claims hold that biographical

interpretations of literature are unreliable in attributing authorship, and that the documentary

evidence used

to

support

Shakespeare's

authorship—title

pages,

testimony

by

other

contemporary poets and historians, and official records—is the same used for all other authorial

attributions of his era. No such direct evidence exists for any other candidate, and Shakespeare's

authorship was not questioned during his lifetime or for centuries after his death.

Despite the scholarly consensus, a relatively small but highly visible and diverse

assortment of supporters, including prominent public figures, have questioned the conventional

attribution. They work for acknowledgment of the authorship question as a legitimate field of

scholarly inquiry and for acceptance of one or another of the various authorship candidates.

Case against Shakespeare's authorship

Very little is known of Shakespeare's personal life, and some anti-Stratfordians take this as

an evidence against his authorship. Further, the lack of biographical information has sometimes

been taken as an indication of an organised attempt by government officials to expunge all traces

of Shakespeare from the historical record and to conceal the true author's identity. For example, a

lack of attendance records for Stratford's grammar school is taken as suggesting that they may

have been destroyed to hide proof that Shakespeare did not attend.

Shakespeare was born, brought up, and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he

maintained a household throughout the duration of his career in London. A market town of

around 1,500 residents about 100 miles (160 km) north-west of London, Stratford was a centre

for the slaughter, marketing, and distribution of sheep, as well as for hide tanning and wool

4

trading. Anti-Stratfordians often portray the town as a cultural backwater lacking the

environment necessary to nurture a genius and depict Shakespeare as ignorant and illiterate.

Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, was a glover and town official

1

. He married Mary

Arden, one of the Ardens of Warwickshire, a family of the local gentry. Both signed their names

with a mark, and no other examples of their writing are extant. This is often used as an indication

that Shakespeare was brought up in an illiterate household. There is also no evidence that

Shakespeare's two daughters were literate.

Anti-Stratfordians consider Shakespeare's background incompatible with that attributable

to the author of the Shakespeare canon, which exhibits an intimacy with court politics and

culture, foreign countries, and aristocratic sports such as hunting, falconry, tennis, and lawn-

bowling. Some find that the works show little sympathy for upwardly mobile types such as John

Shakespeare and his son, and that the author portrays individual commoners comically, as

objects of ridicule. Commoners in groups are said to be depicted typically as dangerous mobs.

Education and literacy

The absence of documentary proof of Shakespeare's education is often a part of anti-

Stratfordian arguments. The Free King's New School in Stratford, established 1553, was about

0.5 miles (0.8 km) from Shakespeare's boyhood home.

Grammar schools varied in quality during

the Elizabethan era, but grammar school curricula were largely similar, the basic Latin text was

standardised by royal decree, and the school would have provided an intensive education

in Latin grammar, the classics, and rhetoric at no cost. The headmaster, Thomas Jenkins, and the

instructors were Oxford graduates. No student registers of the period survive, so no

documentation exists for the attendance of Shakespeare or any other pupil, nor did anyone who

taught or attended the school ever record that they were his teacher or classmate. This lack of

documentation is taken by many anti-Stratfordians as evidence that Shakespeare had little or no

education.

Anti-Stratfordians also question how Shakespeare, with no record of the education and

cultured background displayed in the works bearing his name, could have acquired the extensive

vocabulary found in the plays and poems. The author's vocabulary is calculated to be between

17,500 and 29,000 words. No letters or signed manuscripts written by Shakespeare survive. The

appearance of Shakespeare's six surviving authenticated

signatures, which they characterise as

"an illiterate scrawl", is interpreted as indicating that he was illiterate or barely literate.

1

Bearman, Robert. "John Shakespeare: A Papist or Just Penniless?" Shakespeare Quarterly,

2005.

5

Lack of documentary evidence

Anti-Stratfordians say that nothing in the documentary record explicitly identifies

Shakespeare as a writer; that the evidence instead supports a career as a businessman and real-

estate investor; that any prominence he might have had in the London theatrical world (aside

from his role as a front for the true author) was because of his money-lending, trading in

theatrical properties, acting, and being a shareholder. They also believe that any evidence of a

literary career was falsified as part of the effort to shield the true author's identity.

All the alternative authorship theories reject the surface meanings of Elizabethan and

Jacobean references to Shakespeare as a playwright and instead look for ambiguities and codes.

They identify him with such characters as the literary thief Poet-Ape in Ben Jonson's poem of the

same name and the foolish poetry-lover Gullio in the university play The Return from

Parnassus (performed c. 1601). Such characters are taken as broad hints indicating that the

London theatrical world knew Shakespeare was a front for an anonymous author. Similarly,

praises of "Shakespeare" the writer, such as those found in the First Folio, are explained as

references to the real author's pen-name, not the man from Stratford.

Circumstances of Shakespeare's death

Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 in Stratford, leaving a signed will to direct the disposal

of his large estate. The language of the will is mundane and unpoetic and makes no mention of

personal papers, books, poems, or the 18 plays that remained unpublished at the time of his

death. Its only theatrical reference—monetary gifts to fellow actors to buy mourning rings—

was interlined after the will had been written, casting suspicion on the authenticity of the

bequests.

The effigy of Shakespeare's Stratford monument as it was portrayed in 1656, as it appears

today, and as it was portrayed in 1748 before the restoration

Any public mourning of Shakespeare's death went unrecorded, and no eulogies or poems

memorialising his death were published until seven years later as part of the front matter in the

First Folio of his plays.

Shakespeare's funerary monument in Stratford consists of a demi-figure effigy of him with

pen in hand and an attached plaque praising his abilities as a writer. The earliest printed image of

the figure, in Sir William Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), differs greatly from its

present appearance. Some authorship theorists argue that the figure originally portrayed a man

clutching a sack of grain or wool that was later altered to help conceal the identity of the true

author.In an attempt to put to rest such speculation, in 1924 M. H. Spielmann published a

painting of the monument that had been executed before the 1748 restoration, which showed it

very similar to its present-day appearance. The publication of the image failed to achieve its

intended effect, and in 2005 Oxfordian Richard Kennedy proposed that the monument was

6

originally built to honour John Shakespeare, William's father, who by tradition was a

"considerable dealer in wool"

2

.

Case for Shakespeare's authorship

Nearly all academic Shakespeareans believe that the author referred to as "Shakespeare"

was the same William Shakespeare who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and who died

there in 1616. He became an actor and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men(later

the King's Men), the playing company that owned the Globe Theatre, the Blackfriars Theatre,

and exclusive rights to produce Shakespeare's plays from 1594 to 1642. Shakespeare was also

allowed the use of the honorific "gentleman" after 1596 when his father was granted a coat of

arms.

Shakespeare scholars see no reason to suspect that the name was a pseudonym or that the

actor was a front for the author: contemporary records identify Shakespeare as the writer, other

playwrights such as Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe came from similar backgrounds, and

no contemporary is known to have expressed doubts about Shakespeare's authorship. While

information about some aspects of Shakespeare's life is sketchy, this is true of many other

playwrights of the time. Of some, next to nothing is known. Others, such as Jonson, Marlowe,

and John Marston, are more fully documented because of their education, close connections with

the court, or brushes with the law.

Literary scholars employ the same methodology to attribute works to the poet and

playwright William Shakespeare as they use for other writers of the period: the historical record

and stylistic studies, and they say the argument that there is no evidence of Shakespeare's

authorship is a form of fallacious logic known as argumentum ex silentio, or argument from

silence, since it takes the absence of evidence to be evidence of absence. They criticise the

methods used to identify alternative candidates as unreliable and unscholarly, arguing that their

subjectivity explains why at least as many as 80 candidates have been proposed as the "true"

author. They consider the idea that Shakespeare revealed himself autobiographically in his work

as a cultural anachronism: it has been a common authorial practice since the 19th century, but

was not during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Even in the 19th century, beginning at least

with Hazlitt and Keats, critics frequently noted that the essence of Shakespeare's genius

consisted in his ability to have his characters speak and act according to their given dramatic

natures, rendering the determination of Shakespeare's authorial identity from his works that

much more problematic.

Historical evidence

2

Vickers, Brian. "Stratford's Wool Pack Man", 2006

7

The historical record is unequivocal in assigning the authorship of the Shakespeare canon

to a William Shakespeare. In addition to the name appearing on the title pages of poems and

plays, this name was given as that of a well-known writer at least 23 times during the lifetime of

William Shakespeare of Stratford. Several contemporaries corroborate the identity of the

playwright as an actor, and explicit contemporary documentary evidence attests that the Stratford

citizen was also an actor under his own name.

In 1598, Francis Meres named Shakespeare as a playwright and poet in his Palladis Tamia,

referring to him as one of the authors by whom the "English tongue is mightily enriched".

He

names twelve plays written by Shakespeare, including four which were never published in

quarto: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Won, and King

John, as well as ascribing to Shakespeare some of the plays that were published anonymously

before 1598—Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry IV, Part 1. He refers to

Shakespeare's "sug[a]red Sonnets among his private friends" 11 years before the publication of

the Sonnets.

In the rigid social structure of Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare was entitled to

use the honorific "gentleman" after his father was granted a coat of arms in 1596. This honorific

was conventionally designated by the title "Master" or its abbreviations "Mr." or "M." prefixed

to the name. The title was included in many contemporary references to Shakespeare, including

official and literary records, and identifies William Shakespeare of Stratford as the author.

Examples from Shakespeare's lifetime include two official stationers' entries.

After Shakespeare's death, Ben Jonson explicitly identified William Shakespeare,

gentleman, as the author in the title of his eulogy "To the Memory of My Beloved the Author,

Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us", published in the First Folio. Other poets

identified Shakespeare the gentleman as the author in the titles of their eulogies.

Actors John Heminges and Henry Condell knew and worked with Shakespeare for more

than 20 years. In the 1623 First Folio, they wrote that they had published the Folio "onely to

keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow aliue, as was our S

HAKESPEARE

, by humble

offer of his playes". The playwright and poet Ben Jonson knew Shakespeare from at least 1598,

when the Lord Chamberlain's Men performed Jonson's play Every Man in His Humour at

the Curtain Theatre with Shakespeare as a cast member. The Scottish poet William

Drummond recorded Jonson's often contentious comments about his contemporaries: Jonson

criticised Shakespeare as lacking "arte" and for mistakenly giving Bohemia a coast in The

Winter's Tale. In 1641, four years after Jonson's death, private notes written during his later life

were published. In a comment intended for posterity (Timber or Discoveries), he criticises

Shakespeare's casual approach to playwriting, but praises Shakespeare as a person: "I loved the

man, and do honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any. He was (indeed) honest,

and of an open, and free nature; had an excellent fancy; brave notions, and gentle expressions ..."

In addition to Ben Jonson, other playwrights wrote about Shakespeare, including some

who sold plays to Shakespeare's company. Two of the three Parnassus plays produced at St

John's College, Cambridge, near the beginning of the 17th century mention Shakespeare as an

actor, poet, and playwright who lacked a university education. In The First Part of the Return

8

from Parnassus, two separate characters refer to Shakespeare as "Sweet Mr. Shakespeare", and

in The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus (1606), the anonymous playwright has the

actor Kempe say to the actor Burbage, "Few of the university men pen plays well ... Why here's

our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down”.

An edition of The Passionate Pilgrim, expanded with an additional nine poems written by

the prominent English actor, playwright, and author Thomas Heywood, was published

by William Jaggard in 1612 with Shakespeare's name on the title page. Heywood protested this

piracy in his Apology for Actors (1612), adding that the author was "much offended with M.

Jaggard (that altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name." That

Heywood stated with certainty that the author1 was unaware of the deception, and that Jaggard

removed Shakespeare's name from unsold copies even though Heywood did not explicitly name

him, indicates that Shakespeare was the offended author. Elsewhere, in his poem "Hierarchie of

the Blessed Angels" (1634), Heywood affectionately notes the nicknames his fellow playwrights

had been known by. Of Shakespeare, he writes:

Our modern poets to that pass are driven,

Those names are curtailed which they first had given;

And, as we wished to have their memories drowned,

We scarcely can afford them half their sound. ...

Mellifluous Shake-speare, whose enchanting quill

Commanded mirth or passion, was but Will.

Playwright John Webster, in his dedication to The White Devil (1612), wrote, "And lastly

(without wrong last to be named), the right happy and copious industry of M. Shake-Speare, M.

Decker, & M. Heywood, wishing what I write might be read in their light", here using the

abbreviation "M." to denote "Master", a form of address properly used of William Shakespeare

of Stratford, who was titled a gentleman.

In a verse letter to Ben Jonson dated to about 1608, Francis Beaumont alludes to several

playwrights, including Shakespeare, about whom he wrote,

... Here I would let slip

(If I had any in me) scholarship,

And from all learning keep these lines as clear

as Shakespeare's best are, which our heirs shall hear

Preachers apt to their auditors to show

9

how far sometimes a mortal man may go

by the dim light of Nature

Shakespeare's death—the historical perspective

Постой, путник, зачем спешишь ты мимо?

Прочти, если умеешь, кого завистница-смерть положила под этот камень

Шекспир — от нас ушёл человек живого нрава

Его имя украшает эту могилу больше, чем всё её убранство,

Ведь то, что он написал, заставляет живущих склониться перед его гением.

The monument to Shakespeare, erected in Stratford before 1623, bears a plaque with an

inscription identifying Shakespeare as a writer. The first two Latin lines translate to "In judgment

a Pylian, in genius a Socrates, in art a Maro, the earth covers him, the people mourn him,

Olympus possesses him", referring to Nestor, Socrates, Virgil, and Mount Olympus. The

monument was not only referred to in the First Folio, but other early 17th-century records

identify it as being a memorial to Shakespeare and transcribe the inscription.

[105]

Sir William

Dugdale also included the inscription in his Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), but the

engraving was done from a sketch made in 1634 and, like other portrayals of monuments in his

work, is not accurate.

Shakespeare's will, executed on 25 March 1616, bequeaths "to my fellows John

Hemynge Richard Burbage and Henry Cundell 26 shilling 8 pence apiece to buy them

[mourning] rings". Numerous public records, including the royal patent of 19 May 1603

that chartered the King's Men, establish that Phillips, Heminges, Burbage, and Condell were

fellow actors in the King's Men with William Shakespeare; two of them later edited his collected

plays. Anti-Stratfordians have cast suspicion on these bequests, which were interlined, and claim

that they were added later as part of a conspiracy. However, the will was proved in

the Prerogative Court of the Archbishop of Canterbury

(George Abbot) in London on 22 June

1616, and the original was copied into the court register with the bequests intact.

Leonard Digges wrote the elegy "To the Memory of the Deceased Author Master W.

Shakespeare" that was published in the Folio, in which he refers to "thy Stratford Moniment".

10

Brought up four miles from Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1590s, Digges was the stepson of

Shakespeare's friend, Thomas Russell, whom Shakespeare in his will designated as overseer to

the executors. William Basse wrote an elegy entitled "On Mr. Wm. Shakespeare" sometime

between 1616 and 1623, in which he suggests that Shakespeare should have been buried

in Westminster Abbey next to Chaucer, Beaumont, and Spenser. This poem circulated very

widely in manuscript and survives today in more than two dozen contemporary copies; several of

these have a fuller, variant title "On Mr. William Shakespeare, he died in April 1616", which

unambiguously specifies that the reference is to Shakespeare of Stratford.

Evidence for Shakespeare's authorship from his works

Shakespeare's writings are the most studied secular works in history. Contemporary

comments and textual studies support the authorship of someone with an education, background,

and life span consistent with that of William Shakespeare

There is no record that any contemporary of Shakespeare referred to him as a learned

writer or scholar. Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont both refer to his lack of classical learning. If

a university-trained playwright wrote the plays, it is hard to explain the many classical blunders

in Shakespeare. Not only does he mistake the scansion of many classical names, in Troilus and

Cressida he has Greeks and Trojans citing Plato and Aristotle a thousand years before their

births.Willinsky suggests that most of Shakespeare's classical allusions were drawn

from Thomas Cooper's Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1565), since a number of

errors in that work are replicated in several of Shakespeare's plays, and a copy of this book had

been bequeathed to Stratford Grammar School by John Bretchgirdle for "the common use of

scholars". Later critics such as Samuel Johnson remarked that Shakespeare's genius lay not in his

erudition, but in his "vigilance of observation and accuracy of distinction which books and

precepts cannot confer; from this almost all original and native excellence proceeds".

Even the omnivorous reading imputed to Shakespeare by critics in later years is

exaggerated, and he may well have absorbed much learning from conversations. And contrary to

previous claims—both scholarly and popular—about his vocabulary and word coinage, the

evidence of vocabulary size and word-use frequency places Shakespeare with his

contemporaries, rather than apart from them. Computerized comparisons with other playwrights

demonstrate that his vocabulary is indeed large, but only because the canon of his surviving

plays is larger than those of his contemporaries and because of the broad range of his characters,

settings, and themes.

Beginning in 1987, Ward Elliott, who was sympathetic to the Oxfordian theory, and Robert

J. Valenza supervised a continuing stylometric study that used computer programs to compare

Shakespeare's stylistic habits to the works of 37 authors who had been proposed as the true

author. The study, known as the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic, was last held in the spring of

2010. The tests determined that Shakespeare's work shows consistent, countable, profile-fitting

patterns, suggesting that he was a single individual, not a committee, and that he used fewer

relative clauses and more hyphens, feminine endings, and run-on lines than most of the writers

11

with whom he was compared. The result determined that none of the other tested claimants' work

could have been written by Shakespeare, nor could Shakespeare have been written by them,

eliminating all of the claimants whose known works have survived—including Oxford, Bacon,

and Marlowe—as the true authors of the Shakespeare canon.

Shakespeare's style evolved over time in keeping with changes in literary trends. His late

plays, such as The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Henry VIII, are written in a style similar to

that of other Jacobean playwrights and radically different from that of his Elizabethan-era

plays. In addition, after the King's Men began using the Blackfriars Theatre for performances in

1609, Shakespeare's plays were written to accommodate a smaller stage with more music,

dancing, and more evenly divided acts to allow for trimming the candles used for stage lighting.

Dean Keith Simonton, who researches the factors involved in musical and literary

creativity, especially Shakespeare's, concludes "beyond a shadow of a doubt" that the consensus

play chronology is roughly the correct order, and that Shakespeare's works exhibit gradual

stylistic development consistent with that of other artistic geniuses

3

. Simonton's study, published

in 2004, examined the correlation between the thematic content of Shakespeare's plays and the

political context in which they would have been written. When backdated two years,

the mainstream

chronologies yield

substantial

correlations

between

the

two,

whereas

the alternative chronologies proposed by Oxfordians display no relationship regardless of the

time lag. Simonton, who declared his Oxfordian sympathies in the article and had expected the

results to support Oxford's authorship, concluded that "that expectation was proven wrong".

Shakespeare co-authored half of his last 10 plays, collaborating closely with other

playwrights. Oxfordians claim that those plays were finished by others after the death of Oxford.

However, textual evidence from the late plays indicates that Shakespeare's collaborators were not

always aware of what Shakespeare had done in a previous scene, and that they were following a

rough outline rather than working from an unfinished script left by a long-dead playwright. For

example, in The Two Noble Kinsmen (1612–1613), written with John Fletcher, Shakespeare has

two characters meet and leaves them on stage at the end of one scene, yet Fletcher has them act

as if they were meeting for the first time in the following scene.

Practical Part: textual analysis as a prove of Shakespeare’s authorship

In the practical part of the work, I will try to prove the above established hypothesis: if

Shakespeare is the author of his plays and sonnets, then we will be able to find traces of his

biography in them. These facts are based on experienced events, feelings and character,

respectively reflected in chronological order. Let us take his sonnets.

3

Simonton, Dean Keith. "Thematic Content and Political Context in Shakespeare's Dramatic

Output, with Implications for Authorship and Chronology Controversies". Empirical Studies of

the Arts. Baywood Publishing, 2004.

12

1. The first texts for research are his sonnets. During his entire literary career, Shakespeare wrote

154 sonnets. Several sonnets contain a reference to Shakespeare's name – William, abbreviated

as Will. For example, sonnet 135:

Недобрым "нет" не причиняй мне боли. Желанья все в твоей сольются воле. Перевод:

С.Маршак

Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill;Think all but one, and me in that one—Will.

(С

английского языка имя драматурга, Уильям (Will), переводится как «желание»)

2. Scientists suggest that in London Shakespeare fell in love with a married woman – a beautiful

brunette with brown eyes, whose name could not be revealed. As a reflection of his feelings and

the situation in general, the image of the famous Dark Lady appeared in 27 of his sonnets. Her

appearance is best described in Sonnet 130:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks,

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go -

My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

3. One sonnet (145), according to scientists, contains an indication of Anne Hathaway,

Shakespeare's wife:

'I hate' from hate away she threw, And saved my life, saying 'not you.'

Next, we will look at Shakespeare's plays.

13

1. Shakespeare's only son Hamnet died at the age of 11. Shakespeare was heartbroken and could

not find solace for a long time. One of Shakespeare's darkest tragedies is called "Hamlet" – and

this is presumably a response to the grief of the author himself.

2. In one of his historical dramas, Henry IV, Shakespeare described the process of building and

designing a house very carefully. According to historical parallels, around the same time

Shakespeare bought a new house in Stratford "New Place" and was very busy with the

arrangement of the house. And as a response to this experience, the following lines can be found

in the historical drama:

Пред тем как мы возьмемся строить дом,

Мы тщательно осматриваем место,

Готовим смету, составляем план

И, увидав, что стоимость постройки

Нам не по средствам, строимся скромней,

А то и вовсе ничего не строим.

Все надо делать осмотрясь.

“When we mean to build,

We first survey the plot,

Then draw the model;

And when we see the figure of the house,

Then must we rate the cost of the erection”

The answer to the question of whether Shakespeare was happily married can also be found in his

works: in the historical drama Henry VI, you can find the lines "A hasty marriage rarely ends

well. And you may recall that William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway got married in a hurry

because they were preparing to become parents. Shakespeare was 18 at the time, and in his

comedy "All's Well that Ends Well," he wrote about it as follows: A young man married is a man

that's marr'd.

Thus, we have proved that Shakespeare's biographical facts are reflected in his works in one way

or another. This allows us to consider William Shakespeare, a citizen of Stratford, born on April

23, 1564, as the author of his works and, moreover, the best playwright and poet of all time.

Conclusions.

14

1. Shakespeare’s question has been very popular for a long time, especially during his

lifetime.

2. Anti-Stratfordians represented point of view against his authorship meaning lack of

education in his family and personally Shakespeare`s.

3. To my mind the arguments of Anti-Stratfordians were not evident as they were based

on some facts from his biography. Though they believe that Shakespeare did not get education at

school, he could get education at home, as his father was not poor.

4. Many people because of the lack of evidence of his education, assumed everything

Shakespeare wrote was written by other writers.

5. Despite all the misunderstandings between the pros and cons, Shakespeare remains a

very popular and talented writer.

6. Shakespeare has enriched not only foreign literature, but also the world`s literature, as

he wrote a lot of plays and sonnets and the characters were numerous and diverse and he created

new words and expressions for them.

7. The study, known as the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic, was last held in the spring of

2010. The tests revealed that Shakespeare's work shows consistent, countable, profile-fitting

patterns, suggesting that he was a single individual, not a group, and that he used fewer relative

clauses and more hyphens, feminine endings, and run-on lines than most of the writers with

whom he was compared. The result determined that none of the other tested claimants' work

could have been written by Shakespeare, nor could Shakespeare have been written by them,

eliminating all of the claimants whose known works have survived—including Oxford, Bacon,

and Marlowe—as the true authors of the Shakespeare canon.

Bibliography

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1.Kathman, David. "Why I Am Not an Oxfordian". The Shakespeare Authorship Page.David

Kathman and Terry Ross. Retrieved 8 February 2010.

2.McMichael, George L.; Glenn, Edgar M. (1962). Shakespeare and His Rivals: A Casebook on

the Authorship Controversy. Odyssey Press.

3.Simonton, Dean Keith (2004). "Thematic Content and Political Context in Shakespeare's

Dramatic Output, with Implications for Authorship and Chronology Controversies". Empirical

Studies of the Arts. Baywood Publishing

4.Sawyer, Robert (Spring 2013). "Biographical Aftershocks: Shakespeare and Marlowe in the

Wake of 9/11". Critical Survey.

5.May, Steven W. (2004). "The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford as Poet and Playwright". Tennessee

Law Review. Tennessee Law Review

6.Schoenbaum,S. (1991). Shakespeare's Lives (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press

7.Niederkorn, William S. (30 August 2005). "The Shakespeare Code, and Other Fanciful Ideas

from the Traditional Camp". The New York Times. Retrieved 20 December 2010.

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