Lieber on Shakespeare: 
Addressing his doubted authorship
A satirical essay by Michael Lieber

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Welcome, adieu, sit down those that remain, thank you all for coming, indeed it is a pleasure to see you all here today, my dear Stratfordians and Oxfordians and Baconians and Marlowvians and Twainians and supposers and surmisers and doubters and troglodytes and people who couldn't care less and are only in attendance for the free food, welcome, welcome, welcome. 

I do believe it is the first time in history that you have all been in the same room together, and I do serve myself with sufficient grace to take full credit for that. Now-there! Baconians, I will have none of that here, here at this grand symposium, no I don't care that the Stratfordians threw a shoe, enough is enough! Get yourselves settled, for the matter is at hand, a resolution if you will, concerning the doubted authorship of one William Shakespeare, we'll stay here all night if we have too, and as I'm already behind the podium, I suppose I should start us off. Did an ill-educated, untraveled midland-man really write all those wonderful plays, works of genius. I may as well state my allegiance from the start, I believe he did.

Collectively, the symposium gasps in horror as the period actors Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi approach the podium.
"Stop, Mr. Lieber before you make a fool of yourself", declares Rylance.

"We have here a document, the ''Declaration of reasonable doubt' no less, it currently holds over three thousand signatures of people with higher degrees, declaring their scepticism for the man of Stratford."

"Yes, Mark Twain's signature alone should be enough to convince you" adds Jacobi, brandishing a pen "Sign it Mr. Lieber and be done with this nonsense".

But I have indeed consulted Mr. Mark Twain, and although I found his critical essay 'Is Shakespeare dead?' an enjoyable piece, I'm afraid I am still not convinced, sorry Sam. 

The Symposium falls once again in to disarray, the pre-eminent writer Mark Twain stands up near the back, throws his cigar on the ground and storms out; what is more, the Oxfordians spit on the Stratfordians, the Baconians take off their trousers and toss them hard and rude at the Marlowvians, and the supposers and surmisers simply sit back and enjoy the fiasco.

Calm my friends! Calm, listen to me, I urge you to listen to me, I know your logic, your doubts and it is indeed justified and I agree with you, all does not add up when it comes to dear William, there is a piece missing, the Sphinx is noseless. 

I too have surmised that the wealth of knowledge possessed by the plays does not equate my fellow Midlandman's experience, I agree with you, I do, but understand me now, that your very reasons for believing he didn't write his plays, are my reasons for believing he did. And perhaps for the uninitiated, we should list the four main marks against dear William's name that inspires such doubt in so many.

First, we have the plays themselves, that deliver a detailed knowledge in a variety of subjects of which he could have known nothing about, given his education, status and lack of travel. These include descriptions of battles and foreign lands, logistics of law and falconry, and the inner workings of the Royal court.

Secondly, is the multiple spellings of his name, which crop up no less then eighty different times throughout his life. 
Thirdly, is his legal will that suspiciously does not bequeath any books, parchments or playwright papers of any kind. And lastly for a finishing fourth, the enduring belief that dear, dear old William, was in fact completely illiterate all along, given that most of his family were. 

So without further furtherness, let us begin with the first. Supposing his life before London really was as dull as people surmise. How could a man with zero miles traveled and no higher education, possess the gigantic, unobtainable, cathedral of knowledge held by the plays; you say dear William couldn't and I agree with you, but in the same breath I will also state, that there is scarcely any one person suitable that could possess that level of first-hand knowledge and life experience, leaving the likes of all of you grasping in the dark for some impossible scholar. It could not and will not be any normal man, it has to be, it must be, someone truly divine, verging on deitasation itself. And as I see it, there lies the inherent snobbery that overlooks the obvious, for it is in our nature to make a big mystery out of a hat-man's riddle.

Take the case of Jack the Ripper for example, because of the unanswered question that hovers over his or her head, humanity's imagination has run rampant, envisioning the uncaught killer to be a lorded politician or a famous writer or even a duke or a prince, when in cold reality, it was most likely the first unassuming man who reported the first body, a complete nobody, an individual not worth a second thought, but as we all know, the power of a nobody is that they can be anybody, and the same applies to this colourful question. 

Your politicians and Earls will not do, when one follows the first man to the first word, it is simply dear William, poor William, determined William, the supreme autodidact, and the more he succeeds in winning over the masses, the more the scholars hate him for it, for he is, truly, an outsider. 

Yes indeed, it's Willy all the way, and the richness of experience emanating from the plays supports this fact. You see to 'me', it seems all too much, there are too many obscure references of which mean almost nothing to the groundlings watching the plays and they're certainly not integral to the stories in which they appear, they seem forced, placed on purpose in an effort to impress someone, there is too much, it is over compensating, 'he' has over compensated; like a working class lad in a new office job, spending three months wages on an expensive watch and designer suit, in order to fool his manor-born colleagues, that he is in fact, one of them. 

It is well documented that many well educated, well-traveled and well to do figures of the time, were disparaging of dear William 'Who is this upstart crow? This uneducated dunce of an actor who suddenly thinks he can write plays'; a small mob of snobs, which had all incidentally, either seen battle, were involved in law, or likewise royal dealings. 

Now given William's lack of education and experience, being  sniggered at by all the high-benched intellectuals, I can imagine him feeling the need to, and yes I will say it again, 'over compensate' in his work, gathering and pouring as much life and trivia into his plays as possible. I can see him in a poorly lit pub taking dictation, writing down every word that dribbled from an old sailor's sunburnt mouth, I can see him seeking out letters written by real lawyers and then filtering them through his poetic pen on to the page, in the hopes that Ben Jonson sitting amongst the audience may hear it, and think to himself 'hmm, perhaps this Shakespeare isn't the oaf I previously thought, perhaps he is worth knowing after all', I can see Ben Jonson and others like him, presuming as you have all presumed, that if the knowledge is in the writing, then it must be a reflection of the writers own expertise and intellect. 

And therefore, I put it before you, that the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, rather than being the all-knowing, omniscient writer, was in fact the great assembler. 

All factions, upon hearing this, rage and spit towards the podium, but inevitably lack sufficient trajectory, the front row suffers the blow.

Now! Although half of you have already left the Symposium, I will continue on to the second allegation.
The many spellings of his name, 'Shappere', 'Shaxberd' 'Shakespeare' and others, and if you wish I will also address the bad handwriting, as I know you so, so want me to.

Admittedly, I find this point the weakest of them all, writers have always sought to revise and improve their signatures, it is a matter of vanity that it looks handsome on the page, that it commands respect, and drawing from my previous reasoning, if 'Shaxberd' was a more common spelling of the rarer and more prestigious 'Shakespeare', then it seems perfectly plain to me that he would tweak the spelling; many, many writers have done this, why I myself will confess to it, for my own god given surname was a noble but very labored Welsh handle, with about seven F's nesting in the middle, and in my own earliest years as a London playwright and actor, I spelt this tag in all manner of ways in an effort to improve it, before the great relief of having someone change my surname entirely. She was a dark German mare with chestnut brown hair and Irises as dark as marbles, one of the greatest loves I have ever known, who would begin her perfume letters to me 'Mein lieber Michael'; oh my dearest brown eyed fräulein, whatever became of you; where was I? What was I saying? My thread waves loose in the wind...Yes, William's name, being spelt differently, well for additional reasoning that is cunning in nature, I would draw your attention to the number in question, his name is spelt differently, not ten times, not twenty times, but eighty, there is no accident nor coincidence in eighty, me'thinks the Sphinx has cut off its own nose, it stinks of intention, but I digress. 

Digress to the matter of dear William's atrocious handwriting, which is almost as bad as my own and indeed, any and all intelligent doctors and physicians up and down this scepter'd isle; I reiterate again my warring scholars, the point is weak and weary to stand, it will not stand.

And now for the third allegation, the matter of his legal will, which simply is not that of a writers, and I agree with you on this point, this peculiar point, something is strange here, something is amiss. You see for any determined writer, a will is very important, not just for the bequeathing of books and papers, but for giving one the opportunity to explain what is to be done  and where things are to go; why even now, at the time of this penning, as a reasonably young writer in my mid-thirties, I find myself surrounded by solicitors and lawyers tinkering away at my own will, mostly because of my stubborn request that the majority of my work fall in to the public domain at the time of my death, a matter that perplexes the lawman to no end. 

But if my first presumption is correct, that Shakespeare is indeed the great assembler, then of course there wouldn't be any papers or books to bequeath, as the majority would be other people’s dictations, notes, eye witness accounts, all of which were thrown by his own fair hand in to the fire I should imagine, as he neared the end of his life, in order to leave no trace of reference, no proof to the equation, leaving only one assumption left,  that Shakespeare, is all of it and if this presumption will stand, it shows that not only is dear William the great assembler but also that he wrote the bulk of his plays alone, with no collaborators in sight. 

And lastly, the biggest stain of them all, that the great William Shakespeare, couldn't write a single word; how could a small illiterate child rise to become the greatest writer the world has ever known; again I use myself, not as a point of egotism but as a point of proof, no one was dragged from the depths of illiteracy quite like I was; it stands my friends, it stands, that a small illiterate boy from the Midlands can rise to become a great man of letters. 

In fact there are so many plain parallels between me and dear William, that to doubt his capacity for literary greatness is to doubt my own, and bearing that in mind; Mark Rylance, Derek Jacobi, I will not be signing your Declaration of Reasonable Doubt. In fact, I suggest you ram that ink pen so far up your backsides, that the nearest clerk could use your tongues as a blotting pad, I'll see myself out.
The Symposium erupts in to a full blown riot, the Stratfordians charge in to the Oxfordians, the Baconians and Marlowvians go fist to fist and the screaming Twainians fail to flee as glass bottles and old books are thrown back and forth. 
Was anything resolved, my goodness no, have I contributed anything of value, almost certainly not,  in fact I am fairly certain, I have left the matter, even worse than when I found it.