![]() ![]() Wilmot did all the things that literary biographers did in the 18th century to research a subject. Wilmot was a reverend and a literary scholar, and the story goes that in 1781, when Shakespeare had been dead for nearly 200 years, he set out to write a comprehensive biography of Shakespeare. James Wilmot may have been the first person to think that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare Most damningly, it's a fundamentally classist argument. ![]() The anti-Stratfordian argument is romantic and compelling. Actually, people have been arguing over this question since 1785 at the earliest, when James Wilmot may have coined the first known "anti-Stratfordian theory": the idea that William Shakespeare, the glover’s son from Stratford-on-Avon, did not actually write the plays and poetry that we associate with the name William Shakespeare. ![]() That also means it's been about 400 years since people started arguing about whether or not Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare. April 23, 2016, marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. ![]()
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