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from WGBH April 1989
Who Wrote Shakespeare?
by Al Austin
Four hundred years after the premiere of Hamlet,
the authorship question remains a mystery.
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William Shakespeare of
Stratford-upon-Avon
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 “Isn’t it odd, when you think of it,” Mark Twain wrote, “that you may list all the celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotchmen of modern times, clear back to the first Tudors—a list containing 500 names, shall we say—and you can go to the histories, biographies and cyclopedias and learn the particulars about every one of them. Every one of them except one—the most famous, the most renowned—by far the most
 illustrious of them all—Shakespeare!” Twain went on to suggest that it was because Shakespeare “hadn’t any history to record!”
Biographies of William Shakespeare do exist—hundreds and hundreds of them. But Twain complained that they are composed of guesswork.
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Precious little is known for certain about Shakespeare. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, got married when he was 18, had three children, left his family and went off to London. His name was listed among actors who performed twice for the queen, and he is listed among the shareholders in the Globe Theatre. He returned to Stratford in his 40s, bought a big house, dealt in real estate and grain for a while and died in 1616. His will mentioned no plays or poems or books. Only six examples of his handwriting are known to exist: six signatures, each spelled differently. When he died, nobody seems to have noticed.
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How did this small-town boy with little or no education learn so much about law and history and Italy and Latin and Greek and royalty and all the other knowledge that filled Shakespeare’s plays? Well, say the biographers and historians, by keeping his eyes and ears open and being a genius. Samuel Schoenbaum of Washington, DC, America’s foremost Shakespeare biographer, says, “There are certain things that defy rational explanation. There is something incomprehensible about genius. Shakespeare was superhuman.”
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From "Who Wrote Shakespeare?" by Al Austin, on the FRONTLINE website at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shakespeare/debates/austinarticle.html. Copyright © 1996 WGBH Media Library and Archives. Reprinted by permission of WGBH Educational Foundation.
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