A number of doubters argue that Shakespeare’s provenance from the backwater of Stratford could not possibly have allowed him to accrue the expertise in legal customs, the enlightenment of travel, and the observations of life at the royal court which appear in his plays – they believe that a writer would need the education and opportunity of a nobleman like the Earl of Oxford to achieve the level of detail in these areas that Shakespeare did over the course of the canon. This is one of the most bizarre aspects of authorship theory, because it rests on the assumption that somehow Shakespeare’s mind must have stayed permanently fixed at the level achieved by a middle-class grammar school education, that he could not have learned enough of substance beyond what his instructors taught him to create these plays as an adult.
It assumes that, though his schoolteachers obviously taught him reading, history, rhetoric, and the rudiments of classical languages, he could not possibly have used these skills for his own independent research later. This conclusion seems particularly obtuse, since scholars have long been able to identify the exact sources Shakespeare did use for his plays; he took his plots from Greek and Roman texts, other plays, history chronicles, and so forth, thus it is quite well-established that whoever the person who wrote as William Shakespeare was, that person was doing a lot of reading. Why that person could not be a glover’s son just as well as a nobleman is the sticking point.
The detractors against Shakespeare’s authorship seem to have a categorical prejudice against the possibility of anyone with ordinary parentage or a mediocre education ever developing genius. However, a number of figures including Mozart, William Blake, Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Charlie Chaplin, and modern figures like Martin Scorsese all blossomed into phenomenal talents and geniuses despite lowly upbringings or informal educations. Helen Keller even did it without the benefit of sight, hearing, or speech – and outside of the established schools for the blind. The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus, public speaker Sojourner Truth, and political leader Frederick Douglass began their lives as slaves, but rose to prominence thanks to their inner gifts. Moreover, another famous figure who disproves the class-bound argument for the presence of genius is Leonardo da Vinci. To say that he taught himself Latin, math, anatomy, aerodynamics, and a host of other sciences is obviously an understatement. (It was really only art in which he had a mentor -- one he outgrew.) At the time, the printing press was a brand new invention, yet da Vinci somehow acquired this treasure trove of knowledge on his own. By Shakespeare’s epoch, the printing press had been around for over a century; why could he not have benefited from its invention, and of the presence of book-sellers in London?
The authorship questioners also consider the lack of any documentation that the real Shakespeare ever went to Italy as a serious blot on his credibility, since so many of his plays are set there. They point out that aristocratic young men traveled to Italy in those days as a common facet of their education and coming-of-age. They therefore view specific nobles who were known to have visited Italy, especially the Earl of Oxford, as much more likely candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays than the man from Stratford could be.
Yet they stumble over several critical thinking glitches with this line of reasoning. First of all, the lack of documentation that Shakespeare of Stratford ever went to Italy is hardly conclusive. What would they be looking for? A ticket stub to prove he booked passage on a ship? A ship’s register from over four centuries ago with his name on it? It is ridiculous to expect such things to have been preserved, and there would be no reason for such a trip to be notated in a formal document preserved by civil servants in the town -- which is just about the only solid paper trail actually left by Shakespeare.
Secondly, it is unclear why Shakespeare would have felt he had to travel to Italy in order to write about it. He was not trying to document current life there, or even to be historically accurate, but was in a way always writing fantasies, whether in comedic or tragic form. It would have been very strange to either him or his contemporary playwrights to think of making a real life study of a place when it was fine to merely make it all up -- just as much as when writing about fairies in a forest, or a magician on a deserted island. Besides that, Shakespeare was perfectly content to color all of the exotic locales he wrote about with the same lens: the perspective of Elizabethan England.
Theatre practice in his time did not even strive for historically or ethnically accurate costumes; the actors wore their own Elizabethan clothes when they played ancient Romans, for instance, merely adding a cape or a breastplate. The English were very insular and chauvinistic during Elizabeth’s reign, despite the influence of trade on their culture, and the theatre-going public generally would have seen foreigners as suspect, or as laughable ethnic stereotypes (as they often can be in Shakespeare’s plays – the Welsh and the Irish even being among those they considered foreigners). Finally, most of Shakespeare’s audience would not have gone to Italy themselves, so inaccuracy would not have been a concern.
However, there is also reasoning the Oxfordians use which proceeds in the other direction: starting from the fact that Shakespeare’s plays do frequently have Italian settings, the deduction goes that therefore the person who was Shakespeare must have gone to Italy, and been influenced to set plays there because of his experience with it. Yet this assumption seems to forget that the Renaissance fascination with antiquity would naturally bleed over into a romantic attraction to contemporary Italy, and moreover, that Shakespeare was using the Italianate comedies and the Italian commedia dell’ arte theater troupes as models. The theory also overlooks how popular Italy was in the Renaissance imagination generally – and perhaps even overlooks the fact that Italy is where the Renaissance started. In retrospect, it actually seems as logical for Shakespeare to use Italian settings as it does nowadays for Hollywood to set so many of its disaster or superhero movies in New York City. It is traditional and part of the cultural zeitgeist – not a personal reflection of the artists’ own experiences.
