Hello everyone! I'm Xiao Wu, welcome back to brain hole utopia.
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To be, or not to be, that is the question. I'm a person who has done basically nothing about literature. But basically an illiterate person like me has heard the phrase. It is a white phrase from Prince Hamlet in the first act of the third act of Shakespeare's famous theatrical work Hamlet.
Shakespeare was the father of British theatre, and his surviving works include 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and other poems. And these works are translated into Chinese words today. Shakespeare performed far more often in his lifetime than any other playwright. Lu Xun honored him as Shakespeare and praised him as the most outstanding dramatist in the history of English literature. Ben Jones called him "the soul of the times" and Marx called him "one of the greatest geniuses of mankind."
It is such a genius in the history of literature, who has princes and nobles, the right to fight, the city peddlers, and great joy and sorrow. But he forgot to record his own life. Biographers and historians about Shakespeare's life continue to debate to this day. There is even less accurate information about him. Most mainstream scholars believe that Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564. But in fact we only know that he was born in April 1564, and the exact date is unknown. He was baptized on April 26. At that time, it was common for newborns to be baptized three days after birth, so it was speculated that he should have been born on April 23.
What Shakespeare looks like is actually a mystery. All of the portraits of Shakespeare that remain today were painted after his death. And there are many different versions.
In particular, the painting, once owned by William IV under the title Shakespeare, has now been renamed "An Unknown Man".
The now more recognized portrait of Shakespeare goes like this. The hairline has a high, even somewhat bald head, a high nose, and a small mustache. From the looks alone, he is not a beautiful man.
But how would you feel if I told you that the Shakespeare you knew might be fake from beginning to end, that all his works were not written by him, and that Shakespeare was just a synonym?
Let's talk about Shakespeare's conspiracy theories today. In fact, I don't know whether it is appropriate to call it a conspiracy theory, because the statement that Shakespeare is a dummy has a large number of supporters in Western countries, but it is not accepted by mainstream academics.
In case some viewers may not know much about Shakespeare's life, I will briefly introduce it here.
He was born in the small town of Stratford on the Banks of the Avon River in Warwickshire, England. We are not sure if he had a formal education. Because there is no record of where he used to go to school. But one thing is for sure, Shakespeare didn't go to college.
At the age of 18, he married his wife, Anne Hathaway, who was 9 years his senior. Yes, it is exactly the same as the name of the famous Hollywood beauty. But not the same person. In fact, at that time, 27 years old was really an old woman, after all, people's life expectancy at that time was much shorter than it is now. You can still be beautiful at 27, but it was rare for an 18-year-old man to marry a woman 9 years older than himself. Some say that Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway because Anne was pregnant. After they gave birth to their first daughter, they gave birth to a pair of dragon and phoenix babies in the next 3 years. But like most men, Shakespeare ran away after his wife was old and fading. There is no record of Shakespeare from 1585 to 1592, and no one knows where he was. What was done. But suddenly from 1592 onwards, his name appeared in the historical records of the major theaters in London. Some people say that he sneaked from the countryside to London and developed his career. In short, there are all kinds of rumors. But it was true that at that time, people in the streets would flock to the theater to see his works. The audience is no less fanatical than today's star chasers. It is said that Shakespeare often has a leg with his female fans, from beautiful Lori to charming young women, which can be said to be a non-refusal.
His work initially focused primarily on historical drama and comedy, and later more on tragedy and comedy. Like I said earlier, Shakespeare left a large number of works in his lifetime. But none of his works are mentioned in the records of his death. That's weird. In fact, none of Shakespeare's works have any surviving manuscripts. These works were published and distributed by others after Shakespeare's death.
More than two hundred years after Shakespeare's death, the Industrial Revolution began to convince Europeans and Americans that the power of science could bring down everything. The first to stand up for the use of science to fake Shakespeare was the American female scholar Delia. bacon. She believes that the author of Shakespeare's plays has someone else, and this person should be a high-powered, sensitive aristocratic literati. William. Shakespeare's byline is nothing more than a vest. And Delia. Bacon believed that the real author should be Sir Francis Bacon. Delia. Bacon says that through years of reading Shakespeare's work and analyzing Sir Bacon's living letters, bacon believes that the original manuscript of Shakespeare's plays should be hidden in Sir Bacon's graveyard. She even traveled thousands of miles from the United States to England to dig up the grave of Sir Bacon. But it is conceivable that the unreasonable demand of digging a grave must have been ignored by the Bacon family. One point worth mentioning is Delia. Although Bacon is also surnamed Bacon, he should not be related to Sir Bacon in England.
Although said Delia. Bacon's plan to dig a grave did not succeed, but less than 30 years later, the saying that "Bacon is the real Shakespeare" began to grow wildly in academia. Many people believe that Shakespeare's script contains a lot of politically related codes and codes, implying the identity of the real author, and Sir Bacon did have rumors of creating his own code.
Evidence that many "Baconite" scholars have tried to crack these codes can also be found. Delia. Bacon further argues that Shakespeare's work does not have a unified self-expression. Many people in modern times say that this is Shakespeare's attempt to objectively show human nature. But Delia. Bacon offered a different point of view. She believes that the real author of Shakespeare's plays is a "noble screenwriting squad" led by Sir Bacon, and that "William Shakespeare" is the vest they uniformly use.
By 1920, the writer Thomas. Rooney's proposed candidate for the real author behind the new vest was the Duke of Oxford in England. The reason is that the life trajectory of the Duke of Oxford and Hamlet, King Lear and other Shakespeare male protagonists have many coincidences, and as soon as this theory came out, the eight parties responded. Less than two years later, supporters of the Duke of Oxford's faction formed the Shakespeare Fellowship.
In addition to Sir Bacon and the Duke of Oxford, there were actually some other candidates, but the momentum was not as great as these two factions, so I will not mention it.
If the proponents of shakespeare's non-existence are extreme second-rate scholars, this question may not be enough to draw our attention. In fact, at that time, including Mark Twain, Freud, Chaplin, etc., many cultural celebrities who had reason, judgment and discourse power in the eyes of the world had questioned Shakespeare's true identity.
This makes us realize the seriousness of the problem. Mark Twain once said that Shakespeare was the "most famous anonymous man" on the planet. The American novelist Henry James also said, "I seem to have been brainwashed by the idea that Shakespeare is the biggest and most successful liar the world has ever seen." ”
But even some heavyweights have taken sides, but they have not been able to change the mainstream academic view, they believe that "Shakespeare does not exist" this view, like the mystery of The Kennedy assassination, or the Aboro moon landing fraud theory, that is, people talk about after dinner, is a conspiracy theory, can not be taken seriously.
So is it a conspiracy theory? Let me give you a few facts.
First, many people who have read Shakespeare's works believe that writing at this level requires a very high degree of education on the part of the author. In Shakespeare's works there is a lot of information about the royal justice system, about the aristocratic movement, about different cultures. That Shakespeare was neither born into the nobility nor received higher education. His father worked in a glove factory. All the way to adulthood, Shakespeare lived in a small village 100 miles from London. The total population of the village is more than 1500.
In addition, someone counted that all of Shakespeare's portfolios contained 29,000 different words. 29,000 may not sound like a lot. However, the number of words used by foreigners in their daily lives is normally 3,000. The number of words to pass the GRE exam for a Doctorate in the United States is only 10,000. So what a concept 29,000 words is, you can imagine. And just because you know the word doesn't mean you think of using it when you're writing. Writing is the output of language, and if you can use 29,000 words in your article, your actual vocabulary is much higher than that number.
Third, from Shakespeare's work, it can also be seen that he knows a lot about the structure of the human body. In one of his works, the circulatory system of the human body was mentioned. But the human circulatory system was just discovered by scientists at that time, and it was not made public at all. Unless you are a nobleman or a royal family, it is difficult to know. Another thing that struck me was that the first person to discover the human circulatory system was named William. Harvey, and he was a good friend of Sir Bacon.
Fourth, Shakespeare, as such a famous playwright, has not left any of his handwritten works in the world. The only ones thought to be likely to be Shakespeare's original are the 6 signatures. And this signature is all crooked, and some people can't recognize what is written. Many people think that a person who can't even write his own name can be recognized as the most outstanding dramatist in the history of English literature?
Also, many of Shakespeare's works are set in foreign countries, such as Italy. The work mentions life in Italy, Italian culture, the legal system and much more. So this author should have lived in Italy. There are sources that show that the Duke of Oxford once lived in Italy.
Of course, this point I have enumerated is only part of it. Many proponents of the "Shakespeare does not exist" theory have even published many books on it, and the well-founded arguments are really convincing.
However, in recent years the British botanist and historian Mark Scott has been appointed to the uk. Griffiths offers a whole new perspective. He thinks that Shakespeare is not non-existent, nor is he a vest, but it is very different from the image we know so far.
On 19 May 2015, the BBC reported that Professor Griffith had found an illustration while reading a 400-year-old botanical book. The botanical book, called The General History of Plants, was compiled by the 16th-century botanist John Gerard. A total of 1484 pages, completed in 1598, is considered the thickest botanical single ever published in an English-speaking country. On the title page of the book there is a painting with four figures on it. All along, these four characters have been considered to be fictional, that is, characters that do not exist in real life. But Professor Griffith found the identities of three of the characters. The person in the upper left corner is John Gerard himself, the author of the book, in the upper right corner is the famous botanist of the time, Rembert Dodoens, and in the lower left corner is Lord Burghley, the chief secretary of state of Queen Elizabeth I. So the question is who is this person in the lower right corner? The man had a beard and fluffy, thick hair. Holding a mother-of-pearl plant in one hand and a corn in the other. Professor Griffith said that this person is likely to be shakespeare that we have been looking for for many years.
So what is the basis for his statement?
First, the book was first published, in 1598, at the height of Shakespeare's fame. At the age of 34, Shakespeare should have been at his heyday in both the writing of plays and acting.
Second, the other 2 people in the painting, except Shakespeare, are good friends with the book's author, John Gerard. Professor Griffith believes that the Chief Secretary of State, Lord Burghley, is likely to be the financier behind Shakespeare's creation.
So it is likely that Shakespeare, introduced by Lord Burley, also met the book's author, John Gerard. One could argue that these are Professor Griffiths's speculations, and there is no evidence that Shakespeare and the author of the book are good friends. The professor did list some bases. The main one is the mother-of-pearl in the illustration in the lower right corner that the man is holding.
The shellfish was first introduced to England by the author of the book as a horticultural flower at that time. There is also a description of the mother of the shell in Shakespeare's venus and Adonis. The hero in the book eventually becomes a mother-in-law. Moreover, the only person who mentioned the mother of beetle in the literature of that time was Shakespeare.
Not only that, but there are actually codes hidden in the illustrations on this title page. At that time, many upper-class people in Many Western societies liked to hide some code codes and the like in their paintings. The man in the lower right corner of the painting steps on a carving. There is a string of very strange codes on the carving. The top 4E means quateree in Latin, which translates to English as shake, which means shake.
Dragging this part of the symbol at the bottom, it looks very shaped like an ancient spear. The Spear's English is speed. It adds up to shakespeare.
The second half of the code resembles two WWs, which represent Shakespeare's name William.
The middle letter OR means gold in French. The coat of arms of Shakespeare's family is gold.
Combining all of the above evidence, Professor Griffith believes that the painting in the lower right corner of the title page of this botanical book is likely to be the only portrait of the playwright Shakespeare during his lifetime. If he follows this theory, then the methods of the "Bacon school" and the "Oxford Duke" school before it are not valid. It can even be said that the whole theory that "Shakespeare is a vest" can be overturned. He may have been a character who had existed, but his physical background was unknown.
Of course, there are many different details about the true and false Shakespeare claims that I haven't mentioned. Academics have debated this issue to this day. I don't know if you have a new understanding of Shakespeare in your heart after watching this episode?
Finally, I would like to say that no matter who Shakespeare is, the humanity and literature shown in his works are beyond doubt. As Dickens said, "Shakespeare's life is a beautiful mystery for us, so why should we be afraid every day, lest someone reveal the answer." "