For the first time, pages that are widely-believed to be the only sample of William Shakespeare's handwriting are being made available to the public via digital archive, all thanks to the British Library and its online project Discover: Shakespeare, an educational site dedicated to the wordsmith himself.
While the pages aren't one of Shakespeare's wholly originals, the passage that features the Bard's Tudorian cursive are a scene he was commissioned to write for playwright Anthony Munday's drama Sir Thomas More. Jonathan Bate, a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, described the scene Shakespeare hand-copied as an empathetic plea for people different than ourselves, which the Guardian aptly compared with a rallying cry for Syrian refugees seeking political asylum in our time.
"More asks the on-stage crowd, and by extension the theater audience, to imagine what it would be like to be an asylum seeker undergoing forced repatriation," Bate told the British Library.
There's no doubt that the writing is Shakespeare's — but there is the matter as to who Shakespeare actually was. While many people think of him as he is depicted in an illustration found in the First Folio — the first-ever collection of Shakespeare's plays, which was published in 1623 — a number of academics are convinced that the English playwright, poet and sometimes-actor wrote under the pseudonym of "William Shakespeare," and that the man behind works like Hamlet, Othello and others was someone else entirely.
Some of the primary suspects in this supposed Shakespearean conspiracy are Edward de Vere, also known as the 17th Earl of Oxford, fellow playwright and contemporary Christopher Marlowe, as well as scientist and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon. The list goes on and on.
While many of these theories have been debunked (for instance, the Baconian theory was prominent during the 19th century, but has decreased in popularity since, although the video game Portal 2 jokes that Bacon was actually the Bard all along), many still have a strong following. Many have pointed to Christopher Marlowe (most famous for his plays Edward the Second and The Jew of Malta), who most agree was murdered in a pub brawl in 1593. Despite this, a small contingent claims that Marlowe faked his own death and fled to France to escape persecution for being a Catholic (or was even a Catholic double agent) and wrote under the nom-de-plume "Shakespeare."
An entire scholarship has sprung up around the de Vere theory, called "Oxfordians" after the earl's designated domain. As Richard F. Whalen detailed in his book Shakespeare – Who Was He?: The Oxford Challenge to the Bard of Avon, the 17th Earl of Oxford had the pedigree and the worldly education, as well as familial ties to the people that compiled the First Folio (funny enough, Whalen also points out the inconsistency in Shakespeare's signature, which he purportedly spelled differently and erratically from the way we spell "Shakespeare" today).
While some have deemed Whalen's theories circumstantial, it is food for thought. Even if, in the end, there is no credence to any of these Shakespeare-as-pen-name scenarios, they're still fun to think about. Theories about the possible identity of Shakespeare have even gone as far as to inspire works of fiction and movies, the most recent being 2011's Anonymous (directed by Roland Emmerich — yep, the guy responsible for Independence Day).
Regardless if William Shakespeare was a real man who wrote his own works, or if William Shakespeare was the name used by another for some unknown reason, it's all for naught in the end. What matters is that, no matter what, whoever he was, we have the handwriting (not to mention the works) of the real Bard available for everyone to see.
Source: The British Library
