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Has anyone thought of doing it the other way about, listing all the things that Shakespeare didn't know, like that 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.
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John, just a thought with no claim to being a Shakespeare expert. Many of his bawdy jokes played to the audience's sense of humor, so might he not have joked to make the audience laugh--for instance the idea of Cleopatra playing billiards or Romans in nightcaps.
And my copy of The Yale Shakespeare (Cross and Brooke) which is so heavy I can hardly lift it these days, indicates that many typesetters, publishers, and others made corrections and made mistakes in the manuscript versions that have come down to us.
I am not a little in love with him, or rather with the portrait that hangs in the National Gallery, or rather with the fridge magnet of said portrait which adorns my refrigerator so I admit to being prejudiced against any and all ideas to chip away at his authorship. Somewhere there is a photo of the last meeting of Will and Jayne O. and myself which proves that he wrote it all, or at least that I am convinced that he did. The moony look on my face says it all.