Ron, it's a matter of context. If you arrive in a situation which allows you to flower at age X, then you will flower at age X. It's all a matter of fertilizer. Until the manure is applied and the seed is water'd t'won't grow.

Part of our reality is that unless we come up with contemporary documentation or invent a time machine we will never know the truth.

As a middle class youth, WS almost certainly went to school. A recent email reinforced for me that the nature of basic education has changed. If a country boy went to school, he would have had a good grounding for learning more. If he went to one of the colleges, he would have been exposed to much of the material he would have needed as background for his work.

Consider that, as an artifact, we have a lot of material from the reign of "Good Queen Bess" and others of that era. If we had the same level of retention from the classical Greek period, there would be a similar thread going about whether or not Plate or Euclid wrote their philosophical treatises...or did someone else do it in their names.

What we do know is that someone of genius wrote S's plays, etc. Are we all on the same page about that?