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A popular
sport among advanced scholars of English has been to refute the
accomplishments of Mr. William Shakespeare. Hardly a decade passes but
what some worthy pundit announces to the world that somebody other than
Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. Sometimes it has been Raleigh,
sometimes Bacon, Beaumont, or Fletcher, but in this century, Christopher
Marlowe has been the most popular choice. Things went so far a few
years back that a group of them actually dug up what was left of
Marlowe’s body in hopes that evidence that he wrote Hamlet or Macbeth
or Julius Caesar might be buried with it. The evidence was not
there. Fortunately for them, Mr. Frankland of Lafter Hall was not there
either, so they managed to avoid prosecution for opening a grave without
consent of next of kin.
The reasoning behind such activities is elementary enough. Above
everything else, these Shakespeare-detractors have an enormous respect
for education because they are themselves educated. Now, if these
distinguished intellectuals do not have the command of the English
language exhibited by the author of Hamlet—and they do not—then
how could William Shakespeare, who could not always spell his own name
right, possess such literary powers?
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This
line of thought is irreproachable—so much so that it is imperative that we
apply it wherever else we can. So we must find another English
playwright who was alleged to have written works as elevated as Hamlet and
then examine his educational background for evidence that he might have
been just as ignorant as Shakespeare. The job is not as hard as one might
think. We actually need look no further than Shaw. No, not John Bennett
Shaw, and not the Shah of Iran, and not The Phantom Rickshaw! The
reeeealy big Shaw, himself—George Bernard Shaw! The greatness of G.B.S. did
not merely approach the genius of Shakespeare, it actually surpassed it; and
we have this on the very best authority—Shaw’s own word, and who should
know better than he?
Next, what of the immortal Bernard’s educational
credentials? Was he a highly eminent scholar, therefore immune to the impeccable
logic which has shown Shakespeare to be a fraud? Most authorities agree
that Shakespeare’s formal education extended no further than his fourteenth
year. Fourteen is precisely the age at which Shaw dropped out of school,
never to return again. And although Shaw could spell “Shaw,” he spelled
“show” s-h-e-w and was no better at spelling Shakespeare than Shakespeare
was. We have him wriggling in our nets! He could no more have written Shaw
than Shakespeare could have written Shakespeare. When you have eliminated
the impossible, the truth remains, no matter how improbable!
Then who did write Shaw? To find the answer we
merely have to pursue the Marlowe-Shakespeare scenario to its ultimate
conclusion. Marlowe misled the world into believing that he was dead by
disappearing in a fistfight in 1593. Actually, he lived on to write all the
plays now attributed to Shakespeare. The three parts of Henry VI, which
appeared before Marlowe’s apparent death, are considered to have been
written by neither Shakespeare nor Marlowe. The earliest truly
Shakespearean play then is Richard III, which was first
produced in 1594, or one year after Marlowe’s disappearance. Now, the
earliest Shavian play, Widowers’ Houses, was first produced in 1892.
It follows that its true writer was someone who misled the world into
believing that he was dead by disappearing in a fistfight in 1891. Does
that description fit anyone? It does. It fits one man and only one man, and
anyone who doesn’t know who that man is has no business reading this
journal.
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