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Little is known of Shakespeare's personal life, and some anti-Stratfordians take this as circumstantial evidence against his authorship. [37] Further, the lack of biographical information has sometimes been taken as an indication of an organised attempt by government officials to expunge all traces of Shakespeare, including perhaps his school records, to conceal the true author's identity.
In Benjamin Disraeli's novel Venetia (1837) the character Lord Cadurcis, modelled on Byron, [44] questions whether Shakespeare wrote "half of the plays attributed to him", [45] or even one "whole play" [45] but rather that he was "an inspired adapter for the theatres". [45]
Oxford's candidacy as sole author was first proposed by J. Thomas Looney in his 1920 book Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. [21] Following earlier anti-Stratfordians, Looney argued that the known facts of Shakespeare's life did not fit the personality he ascribed to the author of the plays.
Mainstream academics reject the anti-Stratfordian claim [60] that Shakespeare had not the education to write the plays. Shakespeare grew up in a family of some importance in Stratford; his father John Shakespeare, one of the wealthiest men in Stratford, was an Alderman and later High Bailiff of the corporation. It would be surprising had he not ...
While accepting Shakespeare's own authorship of the canon, Leo Daugherty, who wrote Stanley's life for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), has argued in a recent book that Stanley is the Fair Youth of Shakespeare's sonnets and that Barnfield is the "Rival Poet". [23]
After 1610, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613. [69] His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher, [70] who succeeded him as the house playwright of the King's Men. He retired in 1613, before the Globe Theatre burned down during the performance of Henry VIII on 29 June. [69]
Building on the work of W. J. Courthope, Hardin Craig, E. B. Everitt, Seymour Pitcher and others, the scholar Eric Sams (1926–2004), who wrote two books on Shakespeare, [27] [28] edited two early plays, [29] [30] and published over a hundred papers, argued that "Shakespeare was an early starter who rewrote nobody's plays but his own", and ...
Mendelssohn wrote the incidental music, Op. 61, for A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1842, 16 years after he wrote the overture. It was written to a commission from King Frederick William IV of Prussia. Mendelssohn was by then the music director of the King's Academy of the Arts and of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. [8]