Yes, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare

Cypher wheels and snobbery: the strange story of how Shakespeare became separated from his works

From Charles Nicholl, The Times Literary Supplement

What, aside from international fame, did Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles have in common? The answer is that they all believed that the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare were really written by someone else. The first three belong to the classic “Baconian” era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the claims of Sir Francis Bacon’s authorship were uppermost; and were argued most vociferously in America. Freud and Welles were more modern “Oxfordians”, believing the true author to be Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as first proposed by J. Thomas Looney in 1920. Chaplin was a floating voter, a generic “anti-Stratfordian”. He did not know who wrote the plays, he explained in his 1964 autobiography, “but I can hardly think it was the boy from Stratford. Whoever wrote them had an aristocratic attitude”. More…

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