Observation: Yes, there is a family name Shakespeare. It's also spelled Shakesper, Shakespere, and Shake-spear. But this really doesn't signify anything particularly helpful for our purposes because there was no such thing as consistent spelling in Elizabethan times. Everyone just spelled a word the way it sounded to them (try reading Chaucer), which means the guy who registered your birth might spell it a different way than the guy who registered your mom and dad's marriage had. It was still the family name even if spelled differently. And with Shakespeare, we throw in the guy(s) who printed the plays and the guy(s) who printed the broadsheets to advertise them and friends and business partners. Sheesh!

The first person to significantly attempt to standardize English spelling was Dr. Samuel Johnson in his 'Dictionary' (1755). In it he wrote: "When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules. The ORTHOGRAPHY has been to this time unsettled and fortuitous."

Question: Why couldn't one man have sat in a pub and produced all these wonderful plays? After all, look at the works of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, of Mozart and Beethoven, of Da Vinci and Michaelangelo. One man wrote, composed, or painted all those wonderful works. J.K. Rowling sat in a pub and wrote Harry Potter in spiral notebooks. I have no problem seeing one man, William Shakespeare, being able to compose all those stories. Genius is genius. And generally genius doesn't confine itself to one area of study.

It's been argued that he couldn't have written the plays because he wasn't university educated and how could he have know anything about astronomy? Albert Einstein was home schooled and mostly self-taught. Einstein failed an examination in 1895 that would have allowed him to study for a diploma as an electrical engineer at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich. FAILED the exam!! So, does this mean that he was too uneducated and illiterate to have come up with the theory of relativity? It's also been argued that Shakespeare couldn't have written these plays because he correctly discusses law terms and he never attended law school...which means, I suppose that Mark Twain couldn't have written Puddin'head Wilson for the same reason.

In my humble opinion, too much is made of things people read within (and into?) the plays and not enough emphasis is placed on the external evidence of the contemporary records. In that regard, T.S. Elliot made an interesting point when he said, "I admit that my own experience, as a minor poet, may have jaundiced my outlook; that I am used to having cosmic significances — which I never suspected — extracted from my work (such as it is) by enthusiastic persons at a distance; to being informed that something which I meant seriously is vers de société ['light poetry written with particular wit and polish and intended for a limited, sophisticated audience...The tone is flippant or mildly ironic...' -Encyclopædia Britannica]; to having my personal biography reconstructed from passages which I got out of books or which I invented out of nothing because they sounded well; and to having my biography invariably ignored in what I did write from personal experience; so that in consequence I am inclined to believe that people are mistaken about Shakespeare just in proportion to the relative superiority of Shakespeare to myself."