There's an interesting theory that William Cecil was behind Amy Robsart's tumble downstairs, for the precise reason that he knew it would completely eliminate *any* possibility of QEI marrying Dudley. Howsoever it came about, I've never believed it was really an accident.

*Serious* academic scholars generally agree that William Shakespeare from Stratford upon Avon is the author of the plays, sonnets & lyric poems attributed to him. The various arguments bandied about re:his not having gone to university, etc, fail to take into account the fact that a university education was by no means considered the essential part of being a well-rounded person that it is in modern times. In the 16th century, attending unicversity was generally in the interest of entering clerical orders or studying the law, not in pursuit of a liberal arts & humanities education that it is today.

A person (like William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, et al) with "only" a grammar school education would have been more conversant with Latin & even Greek than most modern classics scholars, and would certainly have read Ovid's "Metamorphoses", for example (from which many themes are used in Shakespeare's work), in the original Latin, despite its availability in an English translation circa 1567.

The attribution of his work to various candidates who were dead (Oxford, Marlowe[dead in a tavern brawl in *1593*!!!, etc)] when a great many of the plays were written is at best simply amusing, and at worst just plain dumb!

D.