Who Will they think of next?
art
http://tinyurl.com/y8wmgtg
<<Depending on which theory you favour, Shakespeare's plays were
written by Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Queen Elizabeth I,
Thomas Middleton, the Countess of Pembroke, John Fletcher and the Earl
of Derby. For centuries scholars have argued that a grammar-school
nobody, a strolling player from Stratford, couldn't have the knowledge
of foreign lands and court protocol that's displayed in Hamlet and The
Tempest. Now a German scholar, Kurt Kreiler, maintains, in The Man Who
Invented Shakespeare, that the Bard's complete works were written by
Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.
De Vere was posh, Cambridge-educated, well-travelled and well-
connected, and he wrote poetry in a style spookily similar to Will's.
Also de Vere's father-in-law, Lord Burghley, seems to have been the
original of Polonius, the sermonising dotard in Hamlet. And de Vere
was known as "Spear-shaker" because his coat of arms featured a lion
with a spear.
Kreiler may convince some gullible Germans that the reliably second-
rate de Vere could have written Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's
Tale without wanting to tell the world he'd done so. But it's an old
chestnut. Parallels between Shakespeare and De Vere were inspected as
long ago as the 1930s, while a De Vere Society flourishes today. It's
hard, though, to get past one fact: De Vere died in 1604. Shakespeare
wrote several more plays after 1604 and before his death in 1616. How
would de Vere have known about the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, to which
there's a clear allusion in Macbeth?>> John Walsh