The reason I hate the “Shakespeare didn’t actually write Shakespeare” theories so much is they seem to be inherently rooted in taking his works away from ordinary people. “The son of a glovemaker could never have written these plays! Surely only an Aristocratic Intellectual, like the Earl of Oxford, could be responsible!“ 

Honestly fuck off. Shakespeare was one of us. His plays were written for the masses. He was an ordinary man who captured the voice of the people and the depths of their emotions. We credit Shakespeare with making up words and phrases, but who’s to say he wasn’t writing down what he heard on the streets? "But something as complex as Hamlet could never have been written by Shakespeare! It must have been the work of a nobleman!” Well guess what, not only did he write it, but he wrote it because that’s what his audience liked. The hordes of ordinary people consumed his deeply philosophical play about a young man musing over life and death and sin and they LOVED it. 

Shakespeare was a crowd-pleaser and an entertainer, and reason his work is so beautiful and poetic and philosophical (as well as bloody and sexual!) is because he was responding to popular demand. Most people attending the theatre were illiterate; they consumed literature by listening, and this is one of the reasons why playwrights utilised iambic pentameter and rhyming schemes. Their dialogue is poetry, and it’s beautiful to listen to. The first time Romeo and Juliet meet, their shared dialogue creates a sonnet. Imagine a commoner sitting in the crowd listening to that, and it hits him like an arrow, wow, listen to the way these characters speak, this is love at first sight. 

Shakespeare was an ordinary man, and the beauty and complexity of his works were fuelled largely by the appetite of ordinary people. Although plays could be written and performed for the aristocracy, it was the hordes at the theatres that one had to keep happy. This modern obsession with putting him on a pedestal and trying to make him high culture or inaccessible to ordinary people is just gross. This upstart crow will always be one of us, and his work will always be for us.

Just to add on a bit, I was an English major, and I remember once in college, my linguist professor was discussing Shakespeare, and how he created new words. She said that linguists have studied the languages of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, and they’ve basically come to the conclusion that Shakespeare didn’t invent these new words, at all. They theorize that he actually picked up these words from young women who would use them, as slang speech. Slang speech in these centuries can be found in letters young women wrote to each other, with the slang coming from them shortening words, in order to write faster. Of course, women’s ways of talking have constantly been looked down upon throughout society, but here’s an article from Smithsonian, discussing the fact that young women throughout history have shaped language, and continue to do so. They say that what holds men back (men trail by about a generation) is the fact that they make fun of the way in which women talk.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/teenage-girls-have-been-revolutionizing-language-16th-century-180956216/

Aside from the blatant classism a lot of “evidence” in the anti-Stratfordian camp is just plain flimsy at best. “Well how could a commoner without a formal education at a big fancy college know about all these subjects like mythology, geography and history?” and the answer is he didn’t. Shakespeare didn’t give a damn about whether Bohemia had a coastline or if Vestal virgins were basically the same as nuns and then there’s the laundry list of artistic license he took with historical plays like Macbeth and Richard III.

And another one, which is my favorite, is the claim that he “couldn’t even spell his own name,” because not once did he ever spell out his name in full on a legal document. Surely a man who wrote hundreds of sonnets and plays didn’t have a grasp of how to spell his own fucking name, I’m sure the problem had nothing to do with it being a long-ass name with a fuckton of letters he couldn’t be assed to write out every single letter every time he had to sign something!

But yeah the entire “Shakespeare wasn’t real” conspiracy theory is just the English literature version of the Flat Earth Society when you actually look into their reasoning and it goes from being insulting to hilarious real fast.

“he ‘couldn’t even spell his own name,’” ooooh that rankles

At the time of Shakespeare the idea of a ‘correct’ spelling for words didn’t even really exist. The idea of a monolingual english dictionary (ie not for translating english to latin) didn’t even really occur until Robert Cawdrey published his Tabel Alphabeticall, or it’s full title:

A table alphabeticall conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard vsuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French, &c. With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of ladies, gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons. Whereby they may the more easilie and better vnderstand many hard English wordes, vvhich they shall heare or read in scriptures, sermons, or elswhere, and also be made able to vse the same aptly themselues.

Which was published in 1604 at least 12 years after Shakespeares plays were first being staged. And as you might guess from that title, the idea of there being a ‘correct’ spelling of any given word had not come into vogue yet.

Yes, that’s correct, the idea that there is only one correct way to spell a word is a comparatively new invention that didn’t arise until Elisha Coles published HIS dictionary in 1676, 60 years after Shakespeares death. This is because previous dictionaries like Cawdrey’s were only designed to explain the meaning of rare and difficult words, whereas Coles’s dictionary was the first attempt at a truly comprehensive dictionary, which led to a formalising of the spelling of the words contained within.

Shakespeare literally couldn’t spell his name wrong, because during his lifetime there was no such thing as an incorrect spelling.