Here's a 400-page biography of Shakespeare from Stratford, by an Oxfordian:
https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeares-Unorthodox-Biography-Evi...
In Hollywood terms, a simple biography of this guy was that he was an actor who became a producer. The "authorship hoax" is that the screenwriter's work was published under the producer's name. In the Elizabethan world, which is second only to Twitter for dubious attestation and pseudonyms, this is about as unlikely as finding a goat on a goat farm.
The Elizabethans were not egalitarians. Social climbing in the Elizabethan world is not unheard of, but it's quite rare and very likely to be remarked on. A country bumpkin who becomes a noted poet on first-name terms with top aristos would be someone everyone talked about, and wrote about. Ben Jonson's ascent was less vertiginous, and he appears clearly in the written record as a human being. Shakespeare the social astronaut is not quite an anachronism, but Shakespeare the reclusive social astronaut is pretty much impossible.
Mainstream conspiracy theories and outsider conspiracy theories often have the same weird, bitchy, false-triumphant tone found in the OP. Like the people who analyze the walls of Auschwitz gas chambers for cyanide derivatives and thus "prove" that the Holocaust couldn't have happened. It takes a lot of work to evaluate the specific piece of evidence, but very little work to listen for this tone.
Here's a 400-page biography of Shakespeare from Stratford, by an Oxfordian:
https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeares-Unorthodox-Biography-Evi...
In Hollywood terms, a simple biography of this guy was that he was an actor who became a producer. The "authorship hoax" is that the screenwriter's work was published under the producer's name. In the Elizabethan world, which is second only to Twitter for dubious attestation and pseudonyms, this is about as unlikely as finding a goat on a goat farm.
The Elizabethans were not egalitarians. Social climbing in the Elizabethan world is not unheard of, but it's quite rare and very likely to be remarked on. A country bumpkin who becomes a noted poet on first-name terms with top aristos would be someone everyone talked about, and wrote about. Ben Jonson's ascent was less vertiginous, and he appears clearly in the written record as a human being. Shakespeare the social astronaut is not quite an anachronism, but Shakespeare the reclusive social astronaut is pretty much impossible.
Mainstream conspiracy theories and outsider conspiracy theories often have the same weird, bitchy, false-triumphant tone found in the OP. Like the people who analyze the walls of Auschwitz gas chambers for cyanide derivatives and thus "prove" that the Holocaust couldn't have happened. It takes a lot of work to evaluate the specific piece of evidence, but very little work to listen for this tone.