Who was Shakespeare?
I’m amused by all the fuss about a portrait recently identified as – maybe, possibly – of William Shakespeare. There’s a fair bit of skepticism around, see this article from the Guardian, for example.
All this fuss about what Shakespeare looked like, and the related arguments about who ‘really’ wrote Shakespeare’s plays, are all fairly pointless, really. The works are what count.
My own answer to “Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays” would be something like the old saw about Homer:
Did you know that they found out that Homer didn’t write ‘The Illiad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ after all?
They were in fact written by another ancient Greek of the same name.
The point being, of course, that we know so little about Homer that it is a distinction without a difference.
It doesn’t quite work for Shakespeare, but it almost does:
Did you know that William Shakespeare didn’t write all those plays?
No, they were written by another Elizabethan of the same name.
