I’ve been getting angry lately because whenever my great admiration of Shakespeare seems to come up in conversation, the response I almost always get back is that “some experts” now believe Shakespeare actually did not write Shakespeare, as if somehow this shocking revelation had previously been unknown to me. I’m not asked why I think Shakespeare is brilliant, or how many years it is I’ve studied and read his work. No. Most people I’ve spoken to about Shakespeare of late are convinced an authorship conspiracy exists, and that it is of utmost importance this fact be believed by anyone they tell it to. I’ve been looked at as if I’m several brain cells short of being a human vegetable when I say I do not see any credible evidence supporting such a belief. Ironically, many of these people have never read or even seen a Shakespeare play performed. And several couldn’t name more than 1 or 2 of his plays when asked. What a shame it’s this idiotic conspiracy nonsense that draws the focus of so many people today unfamiliar with Shakespeare and not an eagerness to understand why he is considered to be the greatest writer in the English language. Bullshit conspiracies that require nothing but a narcissistic belief in one’s own overblown sense of self are easier to grasp than “Hamlet”, I suppose.

The only evidence which exists (evidence that for 250 -300 years no one saw any need to question) of who wrote the works of Shakespeare is that Shakespeare wrote them, though not always alone. It has become well accepted by most Shakespearean scholars today that some of Shakespeare’s plays were written in collaboration with other writers. “Titus Andronicus” and “Henry the 8th” are two which come to mind. This means that the collaborators would have had to agree to hide the real Shakespeare’s identity too. Why? Really, why? Here is an excellent article from 2005 which illustrates my view on this matter and why I no longer think it is acceptable to simply ignore this issue, as I did for decades hoping it would just fade away.

The Shakespeare Code: Is Times Guy Kind Of Bard ‘Creationist’?

While an inquisitive mind and a willingness to sometimes look outside the box are skills every good scholarly skeptic needs, the first and foremost job of any good scientist is to find evidence supporting a hypothesis which can withstand hard, logical scrutiny from those who question its validity before one can begin to form a theory based on that hypothesis. The hypothesis that someone other than Shakespeare HAD to have written Shakespeare hasn’t produced any such evidence. Evidence that some of his last plays and a few of his very first ones having been written in collaboration with other writers does exist. This proves to nullify any authorship controversy for me completely.

Lastly, as much as I love and value Shakespeare, in the grand scheme of the Elizabethan and our current world, he just wasn’t and isn’t important enough to forge a hidden author conspiracy over. Really, Shakespeare was an actor and a play write like Quintin Tarantino is a screen writer and a director today. As much as I love and admire them both, and as great a loss as it would be to the world to have never had Shakespeare’s works to show us what it is to be truly human, the fucking stability of the cosmos does not rest on his or any artist’s works having ever existed at all. It just isn’t that fucking important. Really, it isn’t. Think about it.