This year is the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Britain has celebrated the occasion with enormous gusto. Shakespeare was born and died in Stratford-upon-Avon. During this year&’s celebrations, the fact that his case for authorship is surprisingly weak has naturally been sidestepped or elided. It is weak because almost nothing is known of his personal life, and this has led to all manner of fanciful inference and conjecture; for instance, the “scholarly” books on the years 1599 and 1606 by James Shapiro are replete with “he might have” and “he could have”.

Whatever few personal facts are known about Shakespeare have nothing to do with the claim that he is the author of 37 plays, two major poems and over 150 sonnets. There is no record of his formal education after the age of 13; he certainly never went to any university and, according to Ben Jonson, he had “small Latine and less Greeke”. He obviously knew French but no one knows how he came by this knowledge. He also never seems to have left England, though his only “all-English” play is The Merry Wives of Windsor — all the others have allusions, direct or indirect, to foreign countries. One daughter was illiterate and the other probably so. His will does not mention any books or manuscripts or literary interests and the six examples of his writing are shaky and inconsistent signatures on legal documents. The only other writing attributed to him is a highly contestable segment in the jointly written Sir Thomas More.

No one bothered, either during his lifetime or for decades afterwards, with examining Shakespeare&’s life. From when he left school in 1577 to around 1588, when he started writing plays, are “lost years” when nothing is known and much speculated. His son-in-law, John Hall, in his diaries makes no mention of William Shakespeare&’s literary activities. Nor did his daughters leave any reference to them. There was no questioning Shakespeare&’s authorship until the 19th century, but in the 20th century thousands of scholars have pored over literally millions of documents but produced little more by way of evidence connecting the man with the opus. There is absolutely no paper trail. Very few of the few contemporary mentions of his name link him directly with the plays. How did he come to know about the Bermuda shipwreck of 1610 on which he based The Tempest written in 1611 or 1612, when having nothing to do with the Virginia Company directors, who were the only ones to receive the report of the catastrophe?

http://www.thestatesman.com/supplements/the-shakespeare-conundrum-142473.html