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And there it is, the inevitable final refuge of those who insist on burying their heads in the sand.

No literary work is completely divorced from the author who creates it. If the works of Shakespeare were created by a small town businessman, a money lender, part time actor and play broker with no detectable education and a personal history that casts him more in the form of someone Shakespeare would have been likely to write ABOUT, and not favorably (as, indeed, others wrote unfavorably of the "upstart crow") -- if the Author was indeed this man from Stratford, then we must invoke superhuman genius operating almost entirely in a vacuum in order to explain the works.

If, on the other hand, the Author was, yes, Edward de Vere, an entirely different portrait emerges, and many previously hidden subtexts emerge in the works.

Knowing the true identity of the Author would have a profound effect upon the plays, poems and sonnets.

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Nor did I say there was. However, for someone with the documented background and life of the Stratford man to have produced them -- then, as I said a supernatural genius must have been involved.   One that can apparently pluck information from the air.

Count me amongst the "there's no mystery needing solved" about Shakespeare's identity.

The man had a registered coat-of-arms, a house, a birth and death and marriage certificate, and even his contemporaries (those who knew him) wrote about him after his death. Even his signature survives on at least one document. Clearly, there was a William Shakespeare, playwright.

As to who actually wrote the plays: I would suggest that Shakespeare wrote them in the early forms, mostly based on pre-existing European dramas, legends, and tales -- the scripts off Shakespeare's own pen have not survived to the present day -- and that a collection of actors and playwrights "wrote" the versions of the plays that come down to us today.

After Shakespeare's death, it took about 7 years for the first collection of his plays, "the First Folio" to be produced, as no one (or very few people, perhaps) had actual copies of the plays as he had scripted them. The Folio versions, which comprise all but two of the known plays that we have today, were assembled but an unknown group of people in 1623, which presumably included actors who had been performing the plays and could remember the lines.

Is it therefore not entirely possible that several of the plays (or all) benefitted from years of revisions / additions / subtractions by the actors and scribes of the day? I'm not saying that this accounts for the unique genius of them, but I'm saying that this perhaps partly accounts for the plethora of personas and diverse viewpoints that seem to be represented in the plays.

Anyway, it's always fun to learn more possibilities about the times and Shakespeare himself. It's staggering how many publications are constantly ongoing on the subject of that old bard.

The man had a registered coat-of-arms, a house, a birth and death and marriage certificate, and even his contemporaries (those who knew him) wrote about him after his death. Even his signature survives on at least one document. Clearly, there was a William Shakespeare, playwright.

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Slow down, there. There is one William Shakspere, of Stratford, who meets the criteria listed above -- save one. And NONE of those criteria link him to the plays, or to the profession of playwright -- save that same one, which, as you note, does not occur until after his death.

Somehow, Will Shakspere moved thru London society, producing the greatest plays in the English language, and left absolutely no trace of himself doing so. Plenty of records of him suing people, lending money at interest, selling plays he did NOT write (or sometimes own the rights to!), buying and leasing property, applying for a coat of arms (for his father), hoarding grain during a time of famine, being involved in fights that required the Elizabethan equivalent of restraining orders, etc, etc, etc --- but not a whisper of his supposed career as a playwright. Nothing until he is dead -- a death which, unlike his contemporaries, goes completely unnoticed at the time.

In this, if he was a playwright, he is unique among his supposed fellows.

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Anyway, it's always fun to learn more possibilities about the times and Shakespeare himself. It's staggering how many publications are constantly ongoing on the subject of that old bard.

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Even more staggering how little of that extensive verbiage is actualy ABOUT "that old bard". "Biographies" of Shakespeare read like histories of London, of play writing, of the Elizabethan court, of his contemporaries -- everything imaginable EXCEPT William Shakespeare, playwright.

That man is nowhere to be found -- save in the imaginations of his "biographers", who stitch together fragments of an entirely different life. As Mark Twain put it, Shakespeare is like a brontosaurus -- a few bones and a lot of plaster.

"Knowing the true identity of the Author would have a profound effect upon the plays, poems and sonnets. "

It would greatly affect the scholarship around the plays and those parts of our understanding of Elizabethan society and Elizabethan theatre that Shakespeare (or DeVere or Bacon or whoever) relate to. The plays are still there.

"a supernatural genius must have been involved.   One that can apparently pluck information from the air."

You mean like the information we have about Elizabethan society because it's written down in contemporary texts? That kind of information? Information gleaned from a study of artifacts from the time?

And that's not counting the myriad of direct sources available on courtly life, that a playwright might have had access to.  Servants, craftsmen, suppliers.

Servants, especially, could wander around virtually unnoticed. Any part of courtier interaction that didn't involve secret plotting, but just general socializing would be things that lots of servants would also be privy to.

A lord or earl being able to get that close to commoners socializing without disrupting the situation by his very presence, now that takes superhuman genius.

So, they can't find a single source saying Stratford wrote the Shakespeare plays? Well, they can't find a single source saying someone else wrote them either, can they? It's the old adage: Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

And what, pray tell, is the "not circumstantial" evidence of DeVere's authorship? Now you have me curious.

It would greatly affect the scholarship around the plays and those parts of our understanding of Elizabethan society and Elizabethan theatre that Shakespeare (or DeVere or Bacon or whoever) relate to. The plays are still there.

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Deliberately misinterpreting my meaning isn't going to serve this discussion much, is it?

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"a supernatural genius must have been involved.   One that can apparently pluck information from the air."

You mean like the information we have about Elizabethan society because it's written down in contemporary texts? That kind of information? Information gleaned from a study of artifacts from the time?

And that's not counting the myriad of direct sources available on courtly life, that a playwright might have had access to. Servants, craftsmen, suppliers.

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One thing that sets Shakespeare apart from his contemporaries is the WAY he used his knowledge. Ben Jonson, again, used written sources to flesh out details of his plays, and as a result, the plays read as if he used written sources. Example: He used the language, the terms and phrases, employed by those who rode to the hunt only when he wrote about people doing so. And, scholars have shown, he often used those terms and phrases as lifted DIRECTLY from contemporary sources. He had no first hand knowledge, since he did not hunt himself, and thus used the terms clumsily, as I might be expected to if I wrote about baseball.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, used the language of court, of the law, of the army and navy, of the hunt, and countless other upper class activities, not merely to describe those activities, but as metaphors in situations not connected with those activities at all. (Last Friday I went to see a live performance of OTHELLO, presented by the Shakespeare on the Sound company. As a single example, there is a scene in that play in which Othello, beginning to be convinced Desdemona is being unfaithful to him, uses the language of falconry to describe her. Shakespeare places these words in Othello's mouth easily, casually, and with, it would seem, no concern for the fact that his audience at the Globe would not contain many people who understood them. Falconry was an exploit of the upper classes, and to the "groundlings" of the public theaters, its language might as well have been Greek.)

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Servants, especially, could wander around virtually unnoticed. Any part of courtier interaction that didn't involve secret plotting, but just general socializing would be things that lots of servants would also be privy to.

A lord or earl being able to get that close to commoners socializing without disrupting the situation by his very presence, now that takes superhuman genius.

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Yet Shakespeare writes about just this sort of thing, in Prince Hal for instance. The Author seems quite familiar with the idea of "slumming", yet nowhere in any of his plays do we see a commoner raised to the peerage -- unless, as in "The Taming of the Shrew", for instance, it is in the form of a prank being played on that commoner, being fooled into thinking he is a member of the peerage. (Once again, the common man is a buffoon in Shakespeare's work -- a sign of the Author's high birth, or of appalling self-loathing?)

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So, they can't find a single source saying Stratford wrote the Shakespeare plays? Well, they can't find a single source saying someone else wrote them either, can they? It's the old adage: Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

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Again, you deliberately miss the point. It is TRUE there is no contemporary source that states explicitly that someone other than the Stratford man wrote the works of Shakespeare. However, the fact that there is no contemporary source indicating that he DID write those works renders him, as noted, unique among his contemporaries. Unlike Jonson, Marlowe, Lyly, Kyd, Bacon, etc -- even de Vere! -- about whom literary "paper trails" can be found, Will Shakspere of Stratford left no surviving record of himself as a playwright. No letters to or from him that mention this, no diaries or journals of his own or anyone else's that mention him as a writer, no record of him ever billing any company, theater or patron for the writing of ANYTHING, or of any company, theater or patron paying him for such. When the name Shakespeare appears, it is as a byline, as in "A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, by William Shakespeare," never, ever as in "I was at the tavern, and had drinks with Will Shakespeare, who wrote A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM."

Somehow, the playwright Shakespeare managed to be completely invisible in that capacity, while, also as noted, being abundantly visible as a money lender, play broker, grain merchant (and horder), litigant, sometime actor, and, according to those satirical pieces by others, in which he has been been identified ("Shake-scene", the "Upstart Crow", etc) a braggart and a fool. Shakspere's neighbors, back in Stratford, so far as the record shows, were completely unaware of his London career as the country's greatest playwright. His monument in the church there makes no mention of him as a writer, the record of his death is silent.

It is this thunderous SILENCE on the matter of Shakespeare the Author, by ANY contemporary source, that serves as one of the most profound indications that all is not as it seems.