The question, “Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?” has been asked for centuries. The usual suspects are Edward DeVere; Francis Bacon; Christopher Marlowe: William Stanley, Earl of Derby; Ben Jonson; Thomas Middleton; Sir Walter Raleigh; Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; and Queen Elizabeth I.
So, of all these illustrious people, which one, or group of them, wrote Shakespeare’s plays?
The answer is obvious to all who aren’t in the business of making English literature into someting more complicated than government propaganda: all of them.
In the early 1600s, England was, at heart, a Catholic country. Henry the Eighth had destroyed the monasteries and convents, then given their extensive lands, buildings, and properties to his supporters. He’d made himself some sort of depraved replaement for the Pope, and conformed the English Church outwardly to Catholic form.
But, he’d destroyed The Church. He needed to replace it in running hotels, printers, hospitals, schools, farms, and all the other services The Church had provided for over a thousand years.
He not only had to get rid of the extensive Church literature. Traditional Morality Plays had most of the people in England understanding it was important to be good Catholics. Henry, and his anti-Catholic lackeys, had to replace that literature. They had to download a new literature that focused people on earthly activities, not on saving their souls. And, they had to do it quickly.
He needed the equivalent of broadcast media in London and large commercial centers. So, theaters were subsidized. In London, The Globe showcased the new, non-Catholic literature. The plays attributed to Shakespeare were cranked out at a rapid rate. Then, they were broadcast/downloaded to the new, pseudo-intellectual class i the new theatres/broadcast centers. Those who produced and enjoyed the new productions were favored by the Crown to the exact degree that they were anti-Catholic.
The same state-sponsored anti-Catholicism still rules much of our literature/theatre/movies/TV. It’s no longer found in primitive broadcast networks like theatres, but in the wide variety of communication devices by which the states make their wills known.
Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? They were quickly written by state appointees to replace Church literature with pro-state, anti-Catholicism. Most likely, they were cranked out during long, country-house weekends by people cheerfully vying for a chance to curry favor with the earthly powers that ruled the land.
Some things never change.
