April 23 is the Bard's birthday. Many of us are content just to read or see the plays and enjoy them, but, like it or not, the "Who was he REALLY?" industry keeps chugging along.
Was Shakespeare the love child of Queen Elizabeth?
By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
The Independent, 21 April 2006Theories abound as to the true identity of William Shakespeare, but a new book makes the most scandalous suggestion yet - that the creator of Hamlet and Macbeth was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth I.
In Oxford: Son of Queen Elizabeth I, Paul Streitz, an American writer, makes the sensational claim that Elizabeth I produced several children, overturning accepted notions of the Virgin Queen. He further argues that the first child, secretly sired in 1548, was raised as Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford - who is one of the main claimants to the name of Shakespeare for those who do not believe a lad from rural Warwickshire capable of literary genius.
"I have rewritten Elizabethan history," Streitz claimed from America yesterday, prior to visiting Britain next week to lecture. "The Virgin Queen was a myth created by the Tudor propaganda machine that was copied uncritically by the vast majority of historians in the following centuries." He rejects this, acknowledging that academics will be "gobsmacked" by his audacity. "It's like the Rosetta Stone or The Origin of the Species where everything is suddenly different. You look at it from a completely different perspective."
Read the rest here.
