[William Ray]

"Bohemia doesn't have a sea coast, that Macbeth ruled successfully for eighteen years, that Romans didn't wear nightcaps or have clocks, Cleopatra couldn't play billiards, stuff like that? And he never quotes stuff in Latin, whereas Marlowe does it all the time.

Not a particularly educated man then, rather someone who picks things up, in many ways self-educated. No university for him."

I consider authenticating the author of the Shakespeare canon a significant cultural question and have tried to inform myself on the subject. I would have to differ with Mr. Whitworth, based on what I have read in recent years. Bohemia for instance did have a seacoast in the 13th century, the time of A Winter's Tale (III, iii, 2 and elsewhere), and it was within memory in Italy in the 16th century, the approximate writing of the play. Briefly in the 16th century it was regained and lost again. The writing date is based in part on the price of wool in the play being what it was in 1584 in England. The Shakespeare author did not seem to scruple much about anachronisms, as they, more likely than not, helped engage the interest of the public audience. One would have had to be in Italy to know a detail like Bohemia however. This is quite problematic for our traditional attribution to the Stratford figure, about whom it is generally accepted he never left England or so far as we know the road from Stratford to London in England. Another detail indicating the author's personal knowledge of Italy was the direct reference to Romano's name and statuary in Mantua, the type of marble even, which was not native to Mantua. It was not known that Romano was a sculptor until centuries later with the publication in English of Vasari's study of Italian artists. That is, unless one had been to Mantua and knew from eyewitness investigation. It is quite true that Shakespeare did not impose his knowledge of Latin except rarely as in the joking reference by the gravedigger to se offendendo, a burlesque on the legal term se defendendo. But it is well established that Shakespeare referred over 200 times to Ovid's Metamorphoses in Golding's translation, each time improving on it as though a grown man were improving unerringly on his own earlier work. So the Shakespeare author was as fluent and at ease in Latin as though it were his original literary language--which Latin was to the educated elite. I would therefore have to differ with the idea that the Shakespeare author was uneducated and haphazard in his classical references, as self-educated writers sometimes are uneven in their familiarity with a language or subject. Bullough and Muir have established beyond doubt that there were over 200 foreign authors, classical and Continental alluded to in the Shakespeare canon, which clinches the transcendent education of the author, since most of them were still in their original languages and unavailable in English or the expensive original editions at the time of the canon authorship.

These are some results I have found in my personal study of the issue of who wrote Shakespeare. I do not think the subject can be dismissed with a quip and a snub. It mattered enough to Emerson that he said it was "the first of all literary questions". That this may discomfit the educational and political status quo does not change that importance. In addition, I endorse further study of Mary Sidney Herbert as a major, if not one of the two major, influences on the Shakespeare canon content and philosophy. Her son Philip was closely aligned with the Earl of Oxford by marriage to his youngest daughter. The elder son William Herbert almost married Mrs. Philip Herbert's sister, Bridget Vere. The Earl of Derby, who was known to have been highly active with the King's Men productions, married yet another Vere sister. Indeed the First Folio was dedicated to the two brothers in recognition of their sponsorship and financial support of the First Folio, the compendium of the Shakespeare play canon. There is much justification to learn more in this area and by doing so to re-evaluate an overlooked history of artistic truth versus political expediency in the still glorified and heroized model of that era. The victors make official history, but that does not mean we as individuals and citizens have to believe it just to be polite. Factuality is a good path to spiritual clarity and evolution.