I'm with you. The anti-Shakespeare crew tends to have a dollop of class snobbery, and doesn't understand that a graduate of a quality "grammar school" in the late 16th century had a far more thorough schooling in the classics than today's undergraduate classics major. The alternate theories generally have to go through contortions to explain why their favorites wrote plays when they were dead or 12.
I do think, too, that he was raised in a Catholic household, although I am not persuaded he was a believer in any faith.
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