There have long been theories that Shakespeare did not write the plays that are attributed to William Shakespeare. After all, William Shakespeare came from extremely humble origins with little schooling, so how could he possibly have authored those highly poetic texts which drew upon a vast body of scholarship.

Plus, very little is actually known about Shakespeare the man, and we have hardly any samples of documents in his own  handwriting. A signature here, an interlinear bequest in his will there. No, we don’t have the autograph of any of his plays. Not a one.

So who might actually have written those plays and sonnets?

One candidate is Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe, who was born around the same time as Will Shakespeare. Marlowe was the first playwright to use blank verse in his plays, and he liked to pander to Elizabethan audiences by including lots of bloodshed and violence in his works.

He had the misfortune to die mysteriously at age 29, which was right about the time that Shakespeare arrived in London, so one theory has it that he faked his own death and then wrote plays under the name of Shakespeare. Yeah, right.

Another possibility is Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, who wrote the works anonymously using Shakespeare as his front man. This theory was used for the 2011 film Anonymous directed by Roland Emmerich.

Now I enjoy browsing through some of these theories, but I have to accept Occam’s Razor which basically says that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. So most likely it really was William Shakespeare who wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare, or possibly someone else with the same name.

But I enjoyed listening to the howls of protest from fans of Shakespeare when the Anonymous movie came out. You would have thought someone had threatened to take their firstborn or something. I mean they really seemed to be taking personally the charge that old Willy hadn’t written those plays.

I truly don’t understand people.

Anyway, one of the few samples that we do have of Will Shakespeare’s handwriting appears in his final will and testament that was prepared just weeks before he died.

Will had two daughters, Judith and Susanna, a son Hamnet having died at age 11. Judith was married to Thomas Quiney, who had just been found to have impregnated another woman who died in childbirth along with the baby. Will wanted to make certain that Thomas got as little as possible, so he left Judith £100; another £50 if she was to relinquish the Chapel Lane cottage; if she or any of her children survived three years, another £150, but only the interest not the principal. Thomas Quiney was to keep his philandering hands off the money, unless he were to bestow on Judith lands of equal value. Judith was also given a silver gilt bowl.

To his other daughter Susanna and her physician husband John Hall he bequeathed the rest of his “goods, chattels, leases, plate, jewels, and household stuff whatsoever”.

In one of the most famous and most cryptic interlinear bequests ever made, the Bard of Avon apparently wrote in his own hand shortly before he died: “I gyve unto my wief my second best bed wth the furniture”.

Why only the second best bed?

Scholars have been speculating about that for centuries.

To be continued