Was Shakespeare two different poets?

by Alvin d. C. Lopez
The Pelican Spectator

It is my interest for poetry which renders yesterday, April 23rd, a special day but a degree lower than my fiancée and I’s anniversary. April 23rd is both the traditional birthday and the death anniversary of the most posthumously controversial poet who ever lived, the “Great Bard” of the universe William Shaksper. Yes, the man Shaksper who supposedly wrote the most beloved plays Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello etc., is the authorship rival of another contemporary poet mistakenly celebrated in his day as the same man. And his name was Shake-Speare.

I am not the only fool who doubts whether the bard we know today as William Shakespeare wrote the entire magna opera ascribed to the name “Shakespeare”. There is a long list of men who had expressed their disbelief that the peasant from Stratford-upon-Avon who went not farther than London could write about Venice, Denmark, and France and much of Europe. Among them are Walt Witman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Orson Welles, Henry James, Sigmund Freud and Tyrone Guthrie (Shakespeare Authorship Coalition).

I was most intrigued when I found out that the sonnets, 154 in all, are not actually published under the name “William Shakespeare,” but instead under the pseudonymous SHAKE-SPEARE. Consult every copy of The Sonnets in your local bookstores, and read the introductions which may explain the same incongruity. Furthermore, William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, as we differentiate him from our theoretical SHAKE-SPEARE, is not born as a Shakespeare. Based on the parish registry of the Holy Trinity Church he was baptized on April 26, 1564 as William Shaksper, and he and his family used either Shakspere or Shakspear, but never Shakespeare.

The Stratfordian Shakespeare was educated in a free school chartered in 1553, called the King’s New School, and beyond that he never went to Gray’s Inn (which was the training house for lawyers during his day). Yet, as what can be perceived in his sonnets, legal terms (at least during their time) such as impeach, exchequer, auditor, forfeit, moiety, recompense, sureties, lease and many more (200 in all according to Sobran) are scattered in his lines. In The Merchant of Venice he has an elaborate description of the Italian city customs when in fact he had never been there. Are the writings ascribed to the known “William Shakespeare” actually works of two authors (one William Shakespeare and the other SHAKE-SPEARE) mistaken to be one? But if the former is the playwright and theater owner from Stratford-upon-Avon, who could have been the mysterious SHAKE-SPEARE?

During the 17th century it was not “honorable” for an aristocrat to write plays and poems for the public (unless it was recited for the monarch, like Ben Jonson and the others). Hence most poets of the period published either under pen-names or just left their writings to their will. Such writers who published most of their outputs posthumously were Sir Philip Sydney of the Astrophel and Stella fame, Fulke Greville and Sir Walter Raleigh.
[read the rest of this story on The Pelican Spectator]