William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare

At the end of my last post, I claimed to be moving on from Bryson’s book to The Merchant of Venice. I lied. Last night I went back and re-read the final chapter in Bryson’s book because it is just so entertaining and surprising. In it, he discusses the long history (400+ years) of the conspiracy theory that Shakespeare did not write some or all of his plays. He does such an excellent job of debunking this idea that I had to go back and check it out again. To review, these theories (and there are too many to actually list here) assert things such as the idea that someone of as low a social standing as Shakespeare could not possibly produce such detailed greatness, or that the plays are too widely styled to be by one person, or that Shakespeare was simply not educated enough (and Stratford-on-Avon was just too backward a place) to have produced such a man, and so on. Utter hogwash, and Bryson does a great job of washing the hog, so to speak, first by citing the origin of each theory and then pointing out, in his always humorous and brilliant way, its flaws and errors (my favorite adventure in this part of the book is his exploration of the idea that Francis Bacon was the real author of these plays. It is one of the more entertaining pieces I have read in a long time. Go read Bryson’s book for this tale alone).

Bryson finishes his book (don’t worry, no spoilers) on the following note that I would like to reproduce because it says it so much better that I ever could:

“One must really salute the ingenuity of the Anti-Stratfordians enthusiasts who, if they are right, have managed to uncover the greatest literary fraud in history without the benefit of anything that could have been reasonably called evidence, 400 years after it was perpetrated. When we reflect upon the work of William Shakespeare, it is of course an amazement that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give us such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Strafford was unquestionably that man, whoever he was.”

Geniuses are Geniuses. William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare. Yes.