Who Wrote Shakespeare? @ Cary Library (April 7, 2021)

For more than two centuries, people have questioned how William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon, a man with a grammar-school education who was known in his home town as a grain merchant, not a playwright, whose family was illiterate, and who died in relative obscurity, could possibly have written the greatest dramas and sonnets in the English language. Doubters have included Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles, and several Supreme Court justices. Favorite contenders for being the real Shakespeare include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and especially Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.
Lexington native Doug Stewart (LHS '67) is a retired freelance writer who lives in Ipswich. More than 60 of his feature stories have appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, including several on Shakespeare and Elizabethan England. He is the author of a 2010 nonfiction book, The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare: A Tale of Forgery and Folly.
Sponsored by the Cary Library Foundation.