Shakespeare's pen

Cobbe Portrait of William Shakespeare

This one I don’t even. It’s come up a couple times and I’m still baffled every time it comes up. Most mythbeliefs I can kind of see the quasi-logic behind, but with this one I really can’t.

So what is this mythtory? That William Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays. Edward de Vere is the usual “true” author given when pressed for an alternate author, but I’ve seen other names tossed out as well, like Christopher Marlowe.

So did Shakespeare write Shakespeare? 

War of the Panic

Artwork from the 1906 Belgian edition of The War of the Worlds by Henrique Alvim Corréa

Everyone knows that people who lived before now were stupid.  That’s why they couldn’t tell the difference between a real news program and the radio drama by Orson Welles, The War of the Worlds. Then everyone read about it in the newspapers the next day and realized how stupid they were – but felt better when they realized that everyone in the nation had panicked.

Really, how much of that is there to get wrong?

More than it would seem, apparently.