Hate Mail - I Guess You'd Say Mark Twain Was A Class Snob Too

Oh, no.  You're making the wrong assertion.  I didn't assert that it's impossible,  that someone who grows up in modest conditions in a small town couldn't have written plays and poems.

I didn't even assert that someone of that description couldn't have written good or even great plays and poems*.

I merely said there is not adequate evidence to make even a convincing case that William Shaksper(e) living the life we have evidence of could have written those specific plays and poems.

Your mistake is addressing a specific instance of a man who has left substantial, personal evidence of his life as a broker, a money-lender, a petty hoarder of grain who sold it for a massive profit during a time of food shortages, someone who left a record as being willing to sue people over money owed, etc. was unique among those known to be writers because he left not a single piece of direct, unambiguous evidence that he a. ever wrote anything but a few signatures on legal document related to his business and his will, b. ever read a book, c. ever wrote a letter, d. ever had the legal right to any kind of payment for the production of plays he might have written, e. was ever paid for writing anything, f. who was anything but a man who, in fact, doesn't seem to have left a single, personal document that he ever was a writer.

As Diana Price has established, after centuries of what might be the greatest paper chase in literary history, searching high and low, William Shaksper(e) of Stratford is unique among those asserted to have been authors in the contemporary  history of his time to have left not a single personal document that mentions him having had a literary career.

Furthermore, no one in his family or in his town who knew William Shaksper(e) mentioned him as a writer of poem and plays which became famous in the decade after his death.  No, not even Dr. John Hall, the Stratford man's son-in-law, about the only person associated with William Shaksper(e) of Stratford who left extensive or, indeed, any writing, mentions the man of Stratford in association with the plays and poems, even in the period after the First Folio began to make "William Shakespeare" the most famous writer in the language.

All of the mentions of "William Shakespeare" of Stratford as being the author are posthumous and all of them are either stated with puzzling ambiguity or are  written by people who only knew about the Stratford man as a result of those ambiguous hints in the First Folio.   Ben Jonson, who may well be the author of most of the prefatory material in the Folio, where, in fact, there is first mention of Stratford in association with the poems and plays appears, was clearly implying that the William Shakespeare being sold as the author was not the author.  And there are contemporary commentators, some of them writing, not seven years after the death of the Stratford man but during his life, even during his residence in London, who cast doubt on his association with the plays and poems.

Personally, I think that William Shaksper of Stratford on Avon was written up by Jonson as the crooked "Poet-Ape" who passed off the work of other people as his own.  That was something known to be done in the period and it would explain why the Stratford man left no claims or rights to plays or poems in any document written up for him, he didn't think he could get away with passing that off.  If he were acting as a play broker, an activity which would be more consistent with the career that is documented in actual, primary evidence, he could well have done that.  He may have even been paid off as a false front for someone who wanted their authorship to be concealed, due to the curious similarity of his name with the "Shake-Speare" psudonym under which many things known to not have been by the author of the plays and poems in question were published during his lifetime.

The question isn't a general one about the superiority of one social and economic class over another. That thinking is entirely foreign to me.  As a liberal Irish-American such repulsive, typically British thinking is entirely uncharacteristic among my people.    

The question is if this specific case supports the traditional Stratford based "Shakespeare" industry and the massive money machine that it has founded, not on supporting evidence, but lore and myth made up out of the whimsy of scholars wanting to create a figure who the historical record doesn't document and the equivalent of Chamber of Commerce promotion.  You can't argue this case from general principles because it has to be based in specifics, specifics which, in the case of your Stratford man, don't support your firmly held faith, learned dutifully and dearly held to.

*  It being the class ridden, moral cesspool of England, I'd imagine such a genius from the lower classes would have a life more like that of the tragic Thomas Chatterton than the Stratford businessman.  Or one like that of Ben Jonson which has left extensive direct evidence of his literary activity.

Chatterton's eccentric, imagined past is something that a relatively uneducated, unconnected genius might have dreamed up but it's a far cry from the  imagined worlds of the "historical" plays or the historical accuracy often found in those.  Chatterton is, actually, a perfect example of what someone without an education up to their genius or anything like a decent life might have written and what his likely fate would have been in "enlightenment" England.

If I had any talent for it I might try to imagine what his life would have been like in a less stratified society.   He might have been more like Hamlin Garland.  Though books were far more available to those of modest means at that time in the United States so he'd likely have had access to more accurate background material.  He would have, though, found it impossible to produce factual accuracy without access to such books as the young Garland read at the Boston Public library.   Even a genius can't construct accurate technical knowledge out of their imagination.   He'd likely not have been led to suicide in a stinking class ridden society.

If he were a rural genius, he would have been more like Mark Twain, the great every-man, the "Lincoln of our literature" the great anti-snob who did a bit of creative historical writing of his own.  He was one of the first major doubters of the phonied up Stratford man myth.   It was reading Mark Twain's "Is Shakespeare Dead?" when I was trying to read all of Twain that first led me into doubting that he was the guy who really wrote the plays and poems.   About the only thing I've pointed out that he didn't was the work of Diana Price and that's because no one had had the common sense to do the research that she did.   Oh, or the silly assertion about Shaksper having written the "hand D" section of Thomas More, an assertion by members of the Shakespeare industry in a desperate attempt to give their guy what he so conspicuously didn't have, a literary paper trail.