William Shakespeare

He was the most famous playwright in history but people still argue about if he really wrote his plays. Some people say it was Marlowe (though Marlowe was killed in 1593, long before Shakespeare's best plays- Hamlet, Macbeth, the Tempest – were written). Now a new film, Anonymous , stirs up the pseudo-controversy again. Why people can't accept it was him is beyond me. James Shapiro, English professor at Yale has surely settled the matter with his book Contested will, in which he examines in detail, and resolutely dismisses all the contenders. Why does no one suggest that Homer didn't write his epics, that Seneca's plays were actually written by Caecilius Brutus, his house slave? Anonymous will appeal to conspiracy theorists, but the rest of us shouldn't bother.