He he.
Wikipedia's article on the The Winter's Tale puts unnecessary rationalizations of the coast of Bohemia, based on a tendentious ten years back in the 13th century, in some much-needed perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter%27s_Tale
None of the plays suggest to me that Shakespeare travelled beyond England; rather the opposite. Shakespeare's Italian geography in TGV is crazy, and yet perfectly normal im the kind of hastily-constructed exotic fictions that Shakespeare and others like him made out of their sources.
The lack of social, historical and literary context in the Declaration is dismaying. Its arguments are lumped together in a mass with no apparent awareness that some are possibly strong but others are incredibly weak. (A typical architectural device of uncritical conspiracy theory: the more mud the better.)
Comments about the lack of cosy domestic anecdote from Jonson, or indeed the supposed lack of eulogies till a whole seven years after the author's death, betray a pretty basic lack of awareness about how differently biography and literary status were conceived in the sixteenth century, compared to our own individualistic times.
Meanwhile no mention is made of such basic biographical sources as Greene's snobbish attack on the upstart uneducated ungentlemanly Shake-scene who had the temerity to write plays, or Meres' 1598 list of plays by Shakespeare, or of the Shakespeare securely embedded in a wider literary community that we might infer from e.g. Love's Martyr in 1601 ("several modern writers whose names are subscribed to their several works...").
That amounts to a mischievous suppression of evidence.
The case that there's something unacceptably odd about Shakespeare's authorship fizzles away when we look at a comparable workaday playwrights from relatively bourgeois backgrounds like Heywood and Dekker. The almost total lack of information about their lives strikes no-one as suspicious. Yet they produced plays by the hundred.
What I would concede is this. Shakespeare was not just a normal bloke, if normal blokes do indeed exist. He has his enigmas, though those enigmas are absent from his legal and business records, and it looks like he led quite a divided life. Biographical material in the Sonnets suggest he had a pretty colourful life in the capital, well away from his wife, children and legal business. He did mix with top nobility and he was at least theoretically bisexual. The plays suggest someone with a more than exceptional openness to an incredible range of society and its interests.
But substituting Shakespeare for someone else (usually someone posh) doesn't make him less of an enigma and it generates significant new difficulties - such as how this posh person's full-time involvement in the commercial theatre for a quarter of a century could pass unremarked. (And turning the author into a noble lord makes it only more incredible that he could write, for example, the hostler's scene in 1H4.)
Doubting that a person with Shakespeare's apparently commonplace background could be so interesting, gifted and enigmatic betrays an extraordinary scepticism about the possibilities of the human spirit. That's what I think, anyway.
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