I have no doubt in my mind that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. That is a fact.
The snarling dogfight over "who" Shakespeare "was" is a different matter entirely.
It's a bit like the visits of minority religious groups who come knocking and persuading and insisting that their version of the truth is truer than anyone else's. Sometimes I engage them on the doorstep with textual references and encourage them to explore logical extensions to their thinking. At other times I can't be arsed.
I am too busy following my conviction that the augury uttered by the weird sisters in the Scottish Play is based on folk memory, that the battle of Mons Graupius did, indeed take place - at Dunsinane - in the time of Agricola, and, moreover, that the first Tay Bridge disaster occurred as part of the subsequent withdrawal of the occupying troops.
Let me show you the relevant pages of William Stewart's metrical version of Hector Boece's Scotorum Historia ...
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