Conversation:

Of course it was Bacon who wrote the plays as every body knows tha during the interval of Elizabethan plays the audiance partook of a local London delicasy ie cured pig meat between two pieces of bread as this was between two parts of the play it was known as a "Bacon sandwich" who has heard of a Shakespere sandwich I rest my case.

'William Shagspear,' who allegedly was illiterate because a few of his surviving signatures happen to be sloppy, had a son named Hamnet, who died as a child.

But yeah, I'm sure Bacon wrote the plays. As history shows, high caliber authors must be sophisticated courtiers or highly educated philosophers, you know, like William Faulkner and T.S. Eliot.

I don't care who wrote them; they're still tremendous. I don't see why it makes so much of a difference... the person who wrote the plays is "Shakespeare" to me, whoever they really were.

William Shakespeare/Shaxpur/Shugwallow/Smiggerton/Jones was signing his name different ways because standardized spelling had yet to come into fashion. We are still a few years away from Samuel Johnson here, aren't we? Nobody ever accuses Sir Walter Raleigh of being illiterate, and he spelled his name just about every way concievable--excpet for the way that we spell it. I guess this means he never got on a boat, doesn't it.

My favorite stupid theory of alternate Will is that Marlowe wrote all of Shakespeare's plays before his death, and then the pretender of Avon stole them and released them under his own name. Apparently Kit was showcasing DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE and THE MASSACRE AT PARIS while just sitting on HAMLET, OTHELLO, and KING LEAR.
Makes sense to me.

A relative of mine witnessed Will's will, so naturally I have
the identity - but I cannot share it....
..anyway, on the spurious? assumption that blood carries
the ancestral message I will say this: his affections
were upwardly mobile and catholic.

But I have said too much already

Brian Whatcott
Altus OKlahoma
USA