The best known and least known figure in literary history.

In 2006, a member of the Cobbe family saw a portrait in a gallery that they were convinced was a copy of the painting hung in the ancestral home. X-rays proved it was authentic. The Cobbe portrait

Sold in 1839 by Richard Palntagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville (A Duke who had 9 of the first flush toilets in England) to a gallery after losing his entire inheritance through bad investments. The Chandos Portrait

Appeared as the frontispiece of the famous First Folio in It is believed that the artist Martin Droeshout was in his early twenties and not very experienced but got the job because he owned printing equipment. The Droeshout Portrait

Installed by 1623 in Holy Trinity Church. The paint work was ‘refreshed ‘ by an unknown person. 24 years later it was white washed by church wardens It has now been repainted in colour but who knows what the original details or colours were. Gheerart Janssen’s bust

Controversy exists due to: clothing, jewellery, dates, symmetry, pose etc. Why is there controversy over what he looked like? Which portrait do you believe is the most accurate and why?

Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon

 After nearly a million words of text, only 144 words are written by his own hand- legal documents, his name signed six times and the words ‘by me’ on his will.  Not a single note, letter or manuscript survives in his own hand.

 He never spelled his surname the same way twice. The spelling we now use wasn’t one he used.  Other options: Shakespere, Shakspeare, Shakspere  We don’t know for sure how to pronounce his name. Perhaps with a short ‘a’ as in ‘shack’

The first mention of Shakespeare as a playwright came from a pamphlet written by a dying man- Robert Green on thoughts, events in his life and observations of other writers. He died age It was titled: Green’s-Groat’s worth of Wit*, Bought with a Million of Repentance. Describing the folly of youth, the falsehood of make-shift flatterers, the misery of the negligent, and of deceiving Courtesans. Written before his death and published at his dying request. *A groat=small coin worth 4pence

“Yes, trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with out feathers, that this Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide, supposes he is as well able to bomnbast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.’ (Jealous much? Green felt that actors should speak lines, not write them and leave writing to uni grads.

How could a lightly educated son of a glover who never owned a book know so much about law, medicine, court life, military affairs and life abroad possibly produce the most famous literary works of ‘all time’? The suspected authors:  Sir Francis Bacon  the 17 th Earl of Oxford-Edward de Vere  The combined efforts of: Queen Elizabeth I, Christopher Marlowe, Countess of Pembroke, Sir Phillip Sydney and Sir Walter Raleigh (a few of these people were dead at the time Shakespeare was still writing and more than 50 candidates have been suggested)

 Sir Frances Bacon  Some believe him to be the bastard child of Elizabeth I.  He wrote essays about disliking the theatre

Delia Bacon, born in 1811, Ohio, U.S. A teacher and a writer.

In the 1840’s, after a courgar-esque affair with a uni student who would read her obsessive, passionate letters to his mates, she was devastated and became convinced that Francis Bacon wrote the works of William Shakespeare. (She had no known genealogical connection to Sir Francis Bacon)

She financed her trip to England with donations from influential believers; not to research archives, libraries or speak to scholars, but to seek out locations where Bacon spent his life silently hoping to have ‘absorbed atmospheres.’

In 1857 she published The Philosophy of the plays of Shakespeare Unfolded with no mention of the name Francis Bacon. (You just have to assume that’s who she discusses)

 Exhausted by this work, she retreated to insanity and died under institutional care believing she was the holy ghost.  The 675 page book was a failure.  Mark Twain, Henry James were supporters.  Nathanial Hawthorne wrote the preface (he later admitted that he never read the book and was embarrassed to have endorsed a book regarded by critics as hokum.)

 Oxford was admired by the Queen, travelled, spoke Italian, wrote poems and plays.

 J. Thomas Looney published Shakespeare Identified.  He argued that his name was pronounced Loney when publishers knocked him back.

 Sigmund Freud was a fan of the theory before he came up with his own that Shakespeare was of French decent, really named Jacques Pierre.

 However, Oxford died before the Gunpowder plot in 1604, and The Tempest was inspired by a shipwreck in Bermuda of  So how could these later plays such as Macbeth and The Tempest be written by Oxford?

 Why do you think there is so much controversy over who wrote the works of Shakespeare?  Who do you really think wrote the plays?  Do you really care?

 Only 230 or so plays still exist from Shakespeare’s times, including 38 by Shakespeare (about 15% of the total) Shakespeare’s works contain:  138,198 commas  26,794 colons  15,785 question marks  401 references to ears  2,259 character references to love  183 reference to hate =A total of 884,647 words made up of 31,959 speeches spread over 118,406 lines.

 Shakespeare’s vocab. = 20,000 words  Average person’s vocab.=50,000 words  Produced 1/10 th of the most quotable phrases used in the English language.  He made the first recorded use of 2,035 words, approx. 800 of which are still used.  Two of his earliest plays –Titus Andronicus and Love’s Labour's Lost have 140 new words between them

Nouns: accused, addiction, alligator, amazement, anchovies, assassination, backing, bandit, bedroom, bump, buzzers, courtship, critic, dauntless, dawn, design, dickens, discontent, embrace, employer, engagements, excitements, exposure, eyeball, fixture, futurity, glow, gust, hint, immediacy, investments, kickshaws, leapfrog, luggage, manager, mimic, misgiving, mountaineer, ode, outbreak, pageantry, pedant, perusal, questioning, reinforcement, retirement, roadway, rumination, savagery, scuffles, shudders, switch, tardiness, transcendence, urging, watchdog, wormhole, zany

Verbs: besmirch, bet, blanket, cake, cater, champion, compromise, cow, denote, deracinate, dialogue, dislocate, divest, drug, dwindle, elbow, enmesh, film, forward, gossip, grovel, hobnob, humour, hurry, impedes, jet, jig, label, lapse, lower, misquote, negotiate, numb, pander, partner, petition, puke, rant, reword, secure, submerge, swagger, torture, unclog

Adjectives: aerial, auspicious, baseless, beached, bloodstained, blushing, circumstantial, consanguineous, deafening, disgraceful, domineering, enrapt, epileptic, equivocal, eventful, fashionable, foregone, frugal, generous, gloomy, gnarled, hush, inaudible, invulnerable, jaded, juiced, lacklustre, laughable, lonely, lustrous, madcap, majestic, marketable, monumental, nervy, noiseless, obscene, Olympian, premeditated, promethean, quarrelsome, radiance, rancorous, reclusive, remorseless, rival, sacrificial, sanctimonious, soft hearted, splitting, stealthy, traditional, tranquil, unmitigated, unreal, varied, vaulting, viewless, widowed, worthless, yelping

Adverbs: importantly, instinctively, obsequiously, threateningly, tightly, trippingly, unaware and countless others (including countless)

 All our yesterdays  Bear a charmed life  Be-all and the end-all  Come what come may  One fell swoop  Something wicked this way comes  A sorry sight  Sound and fury  There's no such thing  What's done is done

 A sail maker living in Bergamo –the most a landlocked city in all of Italy  Prospero of The Tempest sets sail from Milan –2days travel from salt water  Ancient Egyptians playing billiards  Introduction of the clock to Caesar’s Rome 1,400 years too early.

 A typical wage in 1594 was 8pence a day.  One penny-mosh pit  For twopence-wooden seat in a covered gallery  For three pence-hire a cushion for comfort. The fleas were complimentary.  Sixpence-balcony at the back of the stage facing the audience, looking down on the play from behind. (For those who want to be seen and not see)

 The collected works in 1623 unbound= 15shillings, bound=£1 or 44 loaves of Elizabethan bread.  The price became more expensive over the years as his popularity increased. E.g. 5,000 loaves 1850’s - 96,000 by 20 th Century  In 2001 an edition of the First Folio was sold at auction for $6million 9 /17million loaves.

 You could search through hundreds of thousands of documents (marriage, property deeds, messages, conveyancings, trials etc.) each potentially involving 200,000 citizens with names misspellt, abbreviated, blotted beyond recognition as the Wallace’s did in the early 1900’s for 18 hours a day.  All they found was the 6 th signature as a witness to a trial and the deed for a mortgage to the Blackfriar’s theatre.

What’s so good about Shakespeare?