Who wrote them?

Shakespeare was a nom de plume of someone but we don’t know who.

William Shakespeare the gentleman farmer from Stratford upon Avon was not the writer; I don’t think that he ever left Stratford but instead lived out a comfortable life as a well off farmer in that town.

Whoever wrote the plays under the nom de plume “William Shakespeare” was very knowledgeable about writing and about foreign countries and foreign culture.

Many have been put forward as the true author of the plays including the favourite, the Earl of Oxford, but none quite fit the bill.

I think it was a man called ‘Anthony Munday’ who was born 4 years before the farmer of  Stratford and died 17 years after him in 1663 at the age of 73 years.

If you search ‘Anthony Munday’ you will find much about him, so much in fact that it is nothing short of astounding that so little is known of William Shakespeare.

He was driven from an early age and rose through society to do many things including being a sort of James Bond type spy for the royal courts of England.  He wrote many works of plays and poetry and importantly, travelled the whole of Europe and became a polyglot.

Why he chose to write under the Nom de Plume William Shakespeare we don’t know but it may have been because he didn’t write Shakespeare on his own but with others. That’s a guess but it was kept separate from his other writings.  We do know that a play he wrote in cooperation with others was printed with ‘William Shakespeare’ as the author but then quickly withdrawn.

All this we know about a man who was Shakespeare’s contemporary. Where is all the detail for Shakespeare who was such a tour de force and so successful?

It is missing because although a man in Stratford had the same name it wasn’t him. It was a nom de plume wasn’t it.  It was someone else who wrote the works of Shakespeare and that someone else must have had a successful writing career in his own name; these skills don’t appear from nowhere do they?

Anthony Munday was the writer and is the Bard of London.