Capri-Uni--There is little record or evidence of any sort about the life of William Shakespeare--curious for a man whose work, even in his lifetime, was greatly acclaimed-- his plays seem generally to have been generally published anonymously, only aquiring the attribution "Shake-speare" in reprintings after about 1598, and of all his literary contemporaries, only Ben Jonson made any reference to him--Indeed, early biographers began to have doubts about him simply because there was no record of him at all, even in places that there should have been--When William Shakespeare of Strafford-on-Avon died, there was no public tribute to him, though he was wealthy, his estate contained no copies of his own work--no plays, no poems, no first editions, no manuscripts, and his will made no mention of them--strange indeed for a man of such literary impotance, and perhaps even unique in history--
WS works may utilize as many as 21,000 words, Milton used only 10,000, and Bacon, master of law and philospohy and regarded as the greatest intellect of his time, only used about 8,000--WS works include nearly 2000 words that had never been used in print before(at a time when the average man used only 2000-3000 words in total), he demonstrated a mastery of law, yet there is no record that he had any formal education at all--
Another peculiarity is that nowhere in his writings are there either incidents that parallel incidents in his own life, or characters that correspond to those that he knew--nor is there mention of the place he lived in his writing--
It was a time of conspiracy and , and more than one writer payed the ultimate price for his literary creations, so there concealed poets, and anonymous or pseudonymous playwrites. If there is mystery about the authorship of the plays, it seems to have been deliberately imposed--There are many posssible candidates for Shakespeare's works, and the open minded individual will find each compelling, at least until reading about the next--the reason that this is true is that of all the prospects, William Shakespeare seems the least likely to have written his plays--