Who really wrote under the name William Shakespeare?
No original manuscript, seven undocumented years, and a grave disturbed where the skull should be. From that came the reading that Shakespeare was only the name the public saw, while the real writer may have been Francis Bacon or a group of educated, well-connected people.
Read in Vietnamese →In 1623, seven years after William Shakespeare's death, two actors named John Heminges and Henry Condell published the First Folio. The book gathered 36 plays, including Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest. It is the earliest printed collection preserving many of Shakespeare's best-known plays, but no surviving handwritten manuscript of any play came with it.
Shakespeare also disappears from the records for seven years. After the baptism of his twins, Hamnet and Judith, in 1585, no document says where he lived or what he did until the playwright Robert Greene mentioned a new actor and writer in London in 1592. A man from Stratford-upon-Avon then appeared on the stage, bought property, and had his name printed on plays. The gap before that public arrival still has no documentary answer.
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