A woman wrote Shakespeare

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And there is so much more to this most interesting hypothesis by Joseph Atwill and John Hudson (published in separate books recently)

But I won't bore you with all the details, and if you are an Aspie and it is interesting to you, I know that you will find out for yourself. I will only say that the biography and published writings of Amelia Bassano Lanier are the most perfect match for all reasonable Shakespearean cannon authorship candidates, in my humble estimation.

OK. Just one tiny thing more: Her as the author (due to some known details of her life) makes every mystery of the works intelligible. And some of the mysteries of Shakespeare text make sense in Hebrew. And there were only a very limited number of Jews and Hebrew speakers in England at the time. Like maybe 200. Bassano can be shown statistically to be the best fit explanation for the loose pieces of the authorship debate.

OK. I will stop there.

I've heard all sorts of different theories about Shakespeare not really being Shakespeare, the most popular one being that he was supposedly the Earl of Oxford. The only thing such schools of thought have demonstrated, in my opinion, is that the name William Shakespeare was probably a pen name - but that doesn't mean he wasn't really the son of a glove maker from Stratford on the Avon who went to London, and made good writing plays. But as the guy has been dead for centuries, it's difficult to prove that point with absolute certainty.

Not as difficult as you might think. Ok. Not absolute certainty. Let's say a probability of one in a million only. The works of Shakespeare have been suspected of being written by someone other than a glove maker's son from Stratford since the time they were written. People like Mark Twain and Freud are among many famous, very well read people who read the plays and said as far as the guy from Stratford, no way.

The primary reason is that the plays and poems themselves contain many very detailed references to things such as life at Queen Elizabeth's Court, intricacies of military life and strategy - especially that of generals, complex references to obscure works of literature that only a very few people had access to and in some cases it is hard to understand how anyone in England at the time had access to, and a glove maker's son would not be one of them. Nor would a man working four days travel from his family and hometown to London, who worked all day in the busy theaters, had time to actually write this complex body of work.

Literary works can now be analysed by computer and searched for word usage patterns and other features that can reveal better fits for debated authorships. When these analyses are done and combined with known biographical and literary works of Amelia Bassano, she wins hands down over all other candidates. And the pool of potential candidates is very small. The best of any theory is the one that fits all the known data points.

Actually, the insight into Queen Elizabeth's court, and the understanding of military life can be explained by the fact that Shakespeare's patron was a high ranking nobleman (who in fact had been mentored alongside the Earl of Oxford by the same chamberlain who had been the inspiration for Polonious in Hamlet ), through whom Shakespeare would have not only have learned these things, but could have rubbed shoulders with the kind of people who wrote about. On top of that, Shakespeare was hardly returning home to his family every night to his family in Stratford on the Avon, as he had deserted his family and gone to live in London for most of his adult life.

On the second point, you are wrong. Will from Stratford did move to London as there are records of his arrival in 1596 at first, I think. But he always maintained his connection to Stratford as evidenced by the fact that he was involved in several small and petty lawsuits there. Later in life he bought a large tract of property in Stratford. His wife had a child by him while he was supposedly still pursing his career in London. He died there, leaving his possessions (which curiously contain not a single book, not even a family Bible is mentioned) and his second best bed to his wife.

I am not suggesting that he went back and forth daily from Stratford to London, especially since it was four days travel apart in those days. But he appears to have gone back and forth regularly after going to London and getting involved in the theatre trade.

There are other candidates who also fill the requirement of knowing the intricacies of Court, Oxford being one. But some of the details in the plays contain a heretofore unexplainable aspect of what Shakespeare described of Court life: details about what young women were doing there. What they were reading. How they were learning music. Combining that with the extraordinary depth of women characters in the plays which does not occur in any other works of the time, and it gives much strength to the idea that they were written by a woman.

Bassano's family were the Court musicians since Henry VIII. Amelia herself was the mistress for ten years of Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamerblain in charge of all Court entertainment, the Queens half brother, and in charge of the company that produced most of the plays. Shakespeare's plays contain more musical references than any other plays of the era by 300%.

Amelia's family were also secretly Jewish. It was a crime punishable by death to be openly Jewish in England then. But the plays contain puns in the Hebrew language that have only recently been discovered, as well as very obscure references to Hebrew texts that were unknown in England at the time, but were available in Italy where Bassano's family came from and regularly returned to visit.

Amelia Bassano Lanier was the first woman to publish a book of original verse in the English language and her book has many literary overlaps with language in the plays and poems of Shakespeare.

Do you have a particular Shakespeare author candidate you favor?

I had not meant to imply that Shakespeare had broken off all contact with his old town, but London had very much become his new home till he retired and returned to Stratford on the Avon. And while he was a family man, he was not a very good one, as he had deserted his wife for all practical purposes. He doubtlessly had been filled with resentment toward the missus, as he had gotten her pregnant out of wedlock and had to marry her. In his will, he just left her his bed - sort of implies his true feeling for her.
I don't doubt that your candidate was an extraordinary woman with talents all her own, but that doesn't necessarily make her Shakespeare. As for her Jewish connection - while that does give her certain insights into Jewish culture and traditions most Christians would not have had, the main problem I have with it is how Shakespeare's number one Jewish character, Shylock, is portrayed in such a negative light, even though he is a fleshed out character with motivations for his hatred. I would think a Jewish person wouldn't have had Shylock essentially get his comeuppance, while his daughter converts and marries a Christian at the end of The Merchant Of Venice.
As for who is my favorite candidate for being Shakespeare - that would be the man from Stratford on the Avon, whether his name was really Shakespeare or not.

I agree with you that Will was not a good family man. The signatures of his two daughters on various legal documents shows they could only make a mark and not sign their name, implying they were illiterate. An odd biographical fact for the author of such feminist plays.

As far as Shylock goes, his portrayal is actually for those times astonishingly kind to a Jew. Many productions today attempt to bring out this facet of this play, while what you say is still a common misconception about it.

The hatred and stereotyping of Jews in very ugly ways was commonplace in England at the time. Jews had been expelled en-mass in 1290 and were not allowed to return until the mid-1600s. All Jews who lived in England at the time were "converso", or pretend Christians, or else they would get their heads chopped off or worse.

Merchant of Venice is in fact extraordinary in that it makes a Jewish character human, but there was no way anyone could have published a play with a Jew getting his revenge or his daughter marrying anyone except a Christian in those days.

I absolutely agree that Shylock was a fully fleshed out, three dimensional character whose motivations we can clearly understand. Just the same, I see Shakespeare viewing Shylock through the eyes of a Renaissance era Christian, which was understanding for why he might be a despicable person, but still despicable. As a Lutheran, I am very familiar with how Martin Luther was sympathetic with the plight of Jews of his time, and yet wrote very unsavory things about them. I see Shakespeare very much in the same light.

For those willing to view the plays through the lens of female, Jewish authorship, there are allegorical sub-plots that emerge reflecting on Jewish themes and history. Virtually all of the strange mysteries of the texts disappear, and a rather different story unfolds beneath. One a person could not say in England at the time without risking death.

Amelia was adopted by the Willoghbey family (maybe spelled wrong) who were related to the Tudors of Queen Elizabeth. The family Amelia stayed with for about six years contained the most educated women in England, ones who strongly believed in the education of women at that time. Not in public schools. Those were mostly for boys. I am talking about private tutoring in a private household with an extensive library, something very rare in those days. Something that explains perhaps her contact with so much literature that comes out in the plays and poems.

In several plays she combines some form of her own names (Amelia, Bassano, Johnson and Willoghbey) and connects it to a passage containing a reference to a swan dying to music. This was a very common symbol in literature at the time that basically meant, "Poet Singing Name" One of these plays (Othello I think) this passage with the swan reference was added to the play after Will was dead and an earlier version of the play was already in print. This is a very hard to explain fact that greatly reduces the chances of Will being the author. Amelia was alive when this change in the text occurred.

I suppose anything's possible; but I guess I'm just a Shakespearian traditionalist.

No problem! I just like sharing info on this very fascinating person and perhaps creator of the works of Shake-Spear (a literary allusion to the goddess Athena shaking her spear in revenge. Perhaps.)

The proponents of the "Earl of Oxford as Shakespeare" theory site the Oxford family crest of a bear holding a spear, claiming it was "shaking" said spear.

There are probably many who the image would fit or tie-in with.