Do Shakespeare’s works reflect aspects of life in Stratford-upon-Avon during his time?

[Arthur Neuendorffer]

http://doubtaboutwill.org/pdfs/sbt_rebuttal.pdf

Exposing an Industry in Denial:
Authorship doubters respond to “60 Minutes with Shakespeare,”
Issued by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust on September 1, 2011
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II. Rebuttals to “60 Minutes with Shakespeare”

Question 8: Do Shakespeare’s works reflect aspects of life in
Stratford-upon-Avon during his time?
[Michael Wood, SBT Life Trustee, broadcaster, writer and historian,
and author of In Search of Shakespeare, replies for the SBT]

In the end the Shakespeare authorship question all boils down to a
simple matter of judging historical sources. To deny Shakespeare’s
authorship is to deny the primary sources, above all his will.

But the plays themselves also tell us about their author. They show
that he was a grammar school boy from the Stratford area. They have
local dialect words, and spellings; they show specialist knowledge of
wool dealing and gloving, the two trades his father did in Stratford.
(Think of Feste’s joke in Twelfth Night about chevril, the soft
kidskin used in glove making). The plays show an intimate knowledge of
people and places around Stratford, like the Hackets of Wilmcote (his
mother’s village) in Taming of the Shrew, or real life Cotswold wool-
men like George Vizer and Clement Perkes in Henry IV.

So you can see from the plays themselves that the author came from the
Stratford region, as all Shakespeare’s contemporaries of course knew.
And they knew it because it was true.
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Doubter response:

As “primary sources” go, the Stratford man’s will is actually the one
document that’s most damaging to claims that he was the author of the
Shakespeare canon. It contains no reference to any Shakespeare play or
poem, nor to writing, nor writers, of any kind. Nor does it contain
any reference to books or bookshelves, papers, manuscripts, letters,
or any intellectual property—things any professional writer would
mention in his will.

The plays do not reveal “a grammar school boy from the Stratford
area.” They show us that he was a highly-educated, well-read, well-
travelled intellectual, familiar with the latest thinking in the
fields of astronomy, philosophy and medicine, and with the political
issues of the time. He was also competent in Greek and Latin, and
fluent in French and Italian. In other words, a Renaissance man, not a
“grammar school boy.”

The most striking “specialist knowledge” in the plays is not of wool
dealing and gloving, but of the sea and seamanship, ancient and modern
warfare and the law. Nothing shows that Shakspere had any knowledge of
these subjects, nor any opportunity to acquire it. As for “intimate
knowledge of people and places,” the town of Windsor is mentioned two
dozen times in four different plays. Maybe “Shakespeare” was a
Berkshire boy.

And let’s not forget that the town of Stratford-upon-Avon itself is
never mentioned. There is not the slightest bit of evidence that
Shakespeare’s contemporaries “knew he came from Stratford.” They did
not know it, of course, because it wasn’t true. No one, during his
lifetime, connected Mr. Shakspere of Stratford with the Shakespeare
canon.

— Ramon Jiménez, Author of two books about the Roman Republic, plus
numerous authorship-related articles in The Oxfordian and SO
Newsletter
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