SHAKESPEARE IS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER

By Ndagi Abdullahi Amana Nupe

William Shakespeare, said to be an illiterate villager who flourished in 17th century rural Stratford-upon-Avon, couldn’t have been the author of over 154 excellent sonnets and some 38 masterpiece plays.

How many of the literati, in this 21st century age of computers and the internet, have written twenty or more books? Yet they claim that an uneducated peasant became the greatest writer in English in the 17th century when access to quality education and the printing press was beyond the reach of villagers.

There is no documentary evidence that Shakespeare lived in cosmopolitan London.

The Shakespeare plays, First Folio, were first published in their definitive form in 1623 by the two London actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, seven long years after the purported death of Shakespeare in faraway Stratford-upon-Avon.

Actually, William Shakespeare might as well have been invented by the trio of John Heminges, Henry Condell and Ben Johnson who wrote the preface to the First Folio.

The search for the author of the Shakespeare works takes us directly to King James I who, during the purported lifetime of Shakespeare, collected the most learned English scholars of the day into three Committees that translated the Bible into English from 1604 to 1611.

The question, as asked by Malcolm X, is why wasn’t Shakespeare among the members of the three Committees if Shakespeare was indeed the greatest writer in English in those days?

That the translation of the King James version and the works of Shakespeare were both written around the same period with the same style of English directly means that the two were written by the same author or authors.

Obviously, King James also commissioned the same Committees to secretly write the works that came to be attributed to the fictional character called Shakespeare.

Trouble started in 1781 when Reverend James Wilmot attempted writing a biography of William Shakespeare only to discover, after visiting Stratford-upon-Avon, that if Shakespeare did existed at all then he was a stark illiterate who couldn’t read or write.

By the 19th century many scholars have concluded that Shakespeare was a fictional nom de plume of well-known 17th century men of letters like Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, or even King James I himself.

Big names, including Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Prince Philip (husband of Queen Elizabeth), etc., have also stated that Shakespeare was not the author of the works attributed to him today.

Internal evidences, as observed by Joseph Hart, shows that the Shakespeare works were the works of a group of authors which, Delia Bacon insisted, was headed by Sir Francis Bacon.

Whatever the truth might be, the fact still remains that the sheer numerosity, the high scholarship and the refined courtesan knowledge that went into the writing of the Shakespeare works patently controverts the conventional claim that they were authored by a rustic uneducated William Shakespeare.

Nigerians, and Africans in general, need to start critical analysis of the very foundations of Western scholarship.

The era of sheepishly accepting and believing hook, line and sinker all the rubbish from the West must be phased out in order to properly usher in the ongoing African Renaissance that is still in it’s early stages.

© Ndagi Abdullahi Amana Nupe (0813 798 2743 Whatsapp message only)