Uncle Bill Shakespeare...Alive and Well!

'Astonishing' Shakespeare first edition found (2016)
"A very singular copy of the first known collection of Shakespeare's plays has been uncovered in an aristocratic country house in Scotland. The First Folio is among the most valuable books in the world".

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"What is unique about this particular iteration, according to Oxford Professor Emma Smith, is that the First Folio has usually only been seen as one large volume. Instead, the Bute copy has been split into three, separated by categories of history, tragedy, and comedy."

"This is something that you could take to the fireside and enjoy," Smith told the BBC. "It's a book we most likely now see ... in a glass case, and one of the things that this copy ... shows us is a time when people just really used this book, they enjoyed it, they scribbled on it, they spilt their wine on it, their pet cats jumped on it."

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The 300-year-old Gothic revival house is the ancestral home of the Stuarts of Bute, who first occupied the land some 900 years ago
 
"Sonnet 73, one of the most famous of William Shakespeare 's 154 sonnets, focuses on the theme of old age. The sonnet addresses the Fair Youth. Each of the three quatrains contains a metaphor: Autumn, the passing of a day, and the dying out of a fire. Each metaphor proposes a way the young man may see the poet".
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What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Living With Pandemics (LINK)

"Plague erased social, gender and personal differences. Shakespeare responded by emphasizing people’s unique and inerasable difference. His work is a narrative vaccine".

By Emma Smith
Ms. Smith is the author of “This is Shakespeare.”

Shakespeare’s King Lear berates his daughter Regan as “a plague-sore or embossed carbuncle / In my corrupted blood.”



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Credit...Cassell and Company, Limited,
1899/Print Collector, via Getty Images

OXFORD, England — Twitter has been taunting us: When he was in quarantine from the plague, William Shakespeare wrote “King Lear.”

He had an advantage, of sorts: Shakespeare’s life was marked by plague. Just weeks after his baptism at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, the register read, “Hic incepit pestis” (Here begins the plague). Mortality rates in the town were four times that of the previous, plague-free year. Shakespeare, the son of the town’s glover, survived it and many further outbreaks. Much of his work was composed, if not in lockdown, then in the shadow of a highly infectious disease without a known cure. (Continue)
 
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Shakespeare and the four humors (LINK)
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William Shakespeare. Courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library.


"William Shakespeare (1564–1616) created characters that are among the richest and most humanly recognizable in all of literature. Yet Shakespeare understood human personality in the terms available to his age—that of the now-discarded theory of the four bodily humors—blood, bile, melancholy, and phlegm. These four humors were thought to define peoples‘ physical and mental health, and determined their personalities, as well". (Continue)
 
Question: I understand Shakespeare's parents were illiterate. His daughter Judith, at age 27 ,could not read or write but could only make her mark. I find this rather odd.
He had a complete disregard for study and his schooling was minimal. So, How did this transpire? The writings ascribed to him are genius, but how did they come about?
There are rumors that all his writings were authored by Francis Bacon. Could this have any validity? If so, WHY?
 
@Gaer
Some think that they were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. I suppose we will never know.

Who Wrote Shakespeare's Plays?
Mark Twain Wasn't Buying It
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Mainstream academics mostly deride efforts of independent scholars like Price. It's a tad bit harder to shrug off challenges put — with great wit — by the likes of Mark Twain.

The American humorist never could reconcile what was known about the man from Stratford with the writer who penned "such stuff as dreams are made on."

Twain even wrote a pamphlet in 1909 poking fun at the Bard, called Is Shakespeare Dead? The following is an excerpt:

"It is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare got his vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate acquaintance with the manners and customs and shop-talk of lawyers through being for a time the CLERK OF A STRATFORD COURT: just as a bright lad like me, reared in a village on the banks of the Mississippi, might become perfect in knowledge of the Behring Strait whale-fishery and the shop-talk of the veteran exercisers of that adventure-bristling trade through catching catfish with a 'trot-line' Sundays."
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Why Would Anyone Need to Fake Shakespeare’s Authorship? (LINK)

“Shakespeare” seems exactly the kind of vivid and dashing name that would have lent itself to use as a pseudonym. It may have been meant to invoke Athena (Pallas or Minerva), the Greco-Roman goddess of wisdom (also viewed during the Renaissance as a patron of the arts), who according to legend came into the world brandishing a spear and is very often depicted that way."
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The Goddess Athena

"Writing anonymously or under a pseudonym was commonplace in Elizabethan England. Archer Taylor and Frederic J. Mosher, in their seminal book on pseudonymous writings, The Bibliographical History of Anonyma and Pseudonyma (University of Chicago Press, 1951), stated: “In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Golden Age of pseudonyms, almost every writer used a pseudonym at some time or other during his career.”

"Pseudonyms were important because a person could be punished for saying things that displeased the authorities. For example, a man with the sadly fitting name of John Stubbs had his hand cut off because he wrote that Queen Elizabeth I was too old to marry. People in the nobility had an additional reason for hiding their identities if they wrote poetry, which was considered frivolous, or plays, which were considered beneath a nobleman’s dignity if performed in the public theaters."

"As the anonymous author of The Arte of English Poesie (1589) stated: “I know very many notable gentlemen in the court that have written commendably and suppressed it … or else suffered [allowed] it to be published without their own names to it, as if it were a discredit for a gentleman to seem learned and to show himself amorous of any good art.”
(Continue)
 
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Thank you, Meanderer, I've heard these rumors before but the synopsis I quoted was from "An encyclopedic outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Quabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolicaf Philosophy" and I still think it strange his child was illiterate, and thus could not read his plays, if he was indeed, the author of all his great works.
What I read, said Shakespeare could barely scratch out his own name. The pseudonym theory could also come into play. However, my great love for Samuel Clemens ( Mark Twain) superceeds all rumors.
I appreciate your taking the time to answer. What it comes down to, in my mind is: If Mark Twain won't have it, I won't have it. Thanks!
 
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