Uncle Bill Shakespeare...Alive and Well!

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."
Click to expand...
 
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!
 
Why Is William Shakespeare’s Life Considered a Mystery?

"When Shakespeare died in Stratford, IT WAS NOT AN EVENT. It made no more stir in England than the death of any other forgotten theatre-actor would have made. Nobody came down from London, there were no lamenting poems, no eulogies, no national tears – there was merely silence and nothing more. A striking contrast with what happened when Ben Jonson and Francis Bacon, and Spenser and Raleigh, and the other distinguished literary folk of Shakespeare’s time passed from life"!


And what would the real Shakespeare think of the mystery that now surrounds his life? He’d probably be amused, and glad he is an enigma. After all, “the play’s the thing.”
 
"You Banbury cheese"!


Banbury cheese was an English cheese produced in Banbury, Oxfordshire. Once one of the town's most prestigious exports, and nationally famous, the production of the cheese went into decline by the 18th century, and was eventually forgotten. The cheese is best known today through an insult in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor (1597).
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This insult alludes to the thin proportions of the cheese, especially after its rind was removed, mocking Slender's name and figure.

"This comparison was apparently a common one. A variant is found as early as 1538, when James Dyer reported that a judge in the Court of Common Pleas pithily "compared the case to a Banbury cheese, which is worth little when the parings are cut off. And here the case is brief in substance, if the superfluous trifling that is pleaded be taken away". A similar insult is made in Jack Dunn's Entertainment (1601): "Put off your clothes and you are like a Banbury cheese—nothing but paring". According to linguist Frederic S. Marquardt, writing in 1928, "you Banbury cheese" was still in the common use among American slang; a simplified American descendant of the insult was "you big cheese."


A recipe for the cheese survives in the 15th/16th-century manuscript, Sloane MS 1201:

"Take a thin cheese vat, and hot milk as it comes from the cow. And run it forth withal in summer time. And knead your curds but once. And knead them not too small, but break them once with your hands. And in summer time salt the curds nothing but let the cheese lie 3 days unsalted. And then salt them. And lay one upon another but not too much salt. And so shall they gather butter. And in winter time in likewise, but then hot your milk. And salt your curds for then it will gather butter of itself. Take the wrung whey of the same milk and let it stand a day or two till it have a cream and it shall make as good butter as any other".
 
"Shakespeare Crackpot" performed at Shakespeare's Globe lecture hall on November 20, 2016. Featuring Keir Cutler, PhD and directed by TJ Dawe. This is a 35-minute excerpt of a 60-minute work.

 
"An 81-year-old man named, would you believe it....William Shakespeare from Warwickshire became the second person in the U.K. to receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine". 12/08/20

"Shakespeare puns should be bard, but this is the Second Gentleman of Corona, The Taming of the Flu, The Merchant of Virus... but where does he live? Tier three or not tier three, that is the question". - Michael Macloud

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“Drink is a great provoker of three things…nose painting, sleep and urine. Lechery Sir, it provokes and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance” –Macbeth II,iii
So as The Bard didn't say:
Imbibe the grape,
imbibe the grain,
but heed thou this cautious warning,
If thou should'st quaffeth too much wine,
Thou shalt puketh in the morning.
 
horseless carriage said:
“Drink is a great provoker of three things…nose painting, sleep and urine. Lechery Sir, it provokes and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance” –Macbeth II,iii
So as The Bard didn't say:
Imbibe the grape,
imbibe the grain,
but heed thou this cautious warning,
If thou should'st quaffeth too much wine,
Thou shalt puketh in the morning.
Click to expand...
Would love to know what “nose painting” is lol
 
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