The Stratford Man Trivia Quiz

Answer: Warwickshire

Stratford-upon-Avon is in Warwickshire, about 40 miles from Birmingham. At the time of the Stratford Man's birth, regional dialects were still quite strong, since English had not yet coalesced into the language we know today. One of the strange things about Shakespeare's works is that they contain very few words or idioms unique to Warwickshire, but many that derive from Kentish dialect. Christopher Marlowe was born and raised in Kent.

By the way, no one knows exactly when the Stratford Man was born. We know he was christened on April 26, 1564, and usually children were christened three days after they were born. But he could have been born earlier.

Answer: Glovemaker

The Stratford Man's parents were John Shakespeare and Mary Arden. His father held several offices in the city government, but during his time Stratford was an insignificant, impoverished little hamlet out in the English boondocks, so not too much should be made of that.

He eventually fell upon hard times, and in 1586 was declared a bankrupt. Mary Arden came from a family of small farmers.

Answer: None that is known

It is often asserted that since Stratford boasted of a grammar school, the Stratford Man must have attended it. Not one scrap of evidence supports this belief. There are no existing records, and attendance was not mandatory. The Stratford Man may have attended school (for however many years), or he may
have had no formal education at all. Unless new evidence comes to light, we shall never know.

Answer: True

Since John Shakespeare was a businessman, he was frequently involved in legal matters, and records still exist that he signed - always with a mark, never with a signature. The same is true for the Stratford Man's mother, Mary. This strongly suggests that the Stratford Man's parents could not read or write.

What is perhaps even more remarkable is that we know for certain that one of the Stratford Man's daughters, Judith, was completely illiterate, being unable to sign her name or recognize her husband's handwriting. Her sister, Susanna, could sign her name, but her signature appears very childlike, that of someone who has learned to "draw" her name, and there is no evidence she knew how to read.

This is the family that produced the greatest writer of all time?

Answer: Robert Greene

From February 2, 1585, when his twins Judith and Hamnet were baptized, until the summer of 1592, no one knows what the Stratford Man was doing. Since literally millions of manhours have been spent trying to track him down, it could not have been anything very important.

Robert Greene (1558-92), was an interesting character and a very funny writer. Shortly before his death, in a pamphlet called, "A Groatsworth of Wit Bought With a Million of Repentance," he wrote: "There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger's heart wrapt in a Player's hyde ... is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey." Read the entire passage, and you will see that Greene is referring to the Stratford Man as an actor, NOT as a writer.

Answer: 1593

The first work bearing the name "William Shakespeare" on the title page was not a play, but a poem, "Venus and Adonis." The Stratford Man was 29 when it appeared. In Elizabethan times this was an incredibly old age for a writer to make his literary debut. Furthermore, the work had been registered anonymously, and Shakespeare's name added only at the time of publication, several weeks after the supposed death of Christopher Marlowe. What is even stranger is that it appears to draw upon material from Marlowe's "Hero and Leander," which was not published until 1598. That was the same year "Love's Labor Lost," the first play to carry the Shakespeare name, was published.

Again, millions of hours have been spent trying to uncover anything, anything at all, that the Stratford Man may have written prior to 1593, and researchers have not been able to turn up even so much as an off-color limerick. His first work turns out to be one of the greatest poems of the age, and just happens to read like something Marlowe might have written. Let's see - Marlowe disappears, Shakespeare suddenly bursts upon the scene. Just coincidence?

Answer: 6

While not a single letter, scrap of manuscript or even a laundry list survives that was written by the Stratford Man, there are six extant signatures said to belong to him. But are they really his?

In 1912, Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence published a pamphlet called "The Shakespeare Myth," that casts doubt upon the authenticity of all of them.

The first signature appears on a disposition given by "William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, Gent." in a lawsuit. The document is dated May 11, 1612. The problem with this signature is that it is in the exact same hand as the law clerk who prepared the document!

The second and third signatures are on a purchase deed and a mortgage deed dated March 10 and March 11, 1613. The signatures are clearly not written by the same person - they aren't even close. The most likely explanation is that the first was written by the law clerk of the seller, and the second by the law clerk of the purchaser. In the Stratford Man's time, it was very common for a man to apply his seal to legal documents, and the clerk would pen the signature. That appears to be the situation here.

The final three signatures appear on Shakespeare's famous will, dated March 25, 1616. Again, the first two signatures appear to have been written by the same person who wrote out the will. The final signature, preceeded by the words "by me," may be a genuine signature, at least in part. "William" is written quite plainly, in a bold, practised hand, while "Shakespeare" appears to be in a different hand altogether.

William Beeston, son of one of the Stratford Man's close associates, said that his father told him that whenever the Stratford Man was called upon to write "he was in paine." Durning-Lawrence's conclusion is that not only did the Stratford Man not write the signatures attributed to him, but that he was very likely illiterate (like his parents and children!)

Answer: The Lord Chamberlain's Men

The very few verifiable contemporary references to the Stratford Man invariably describe him as an actor, not a writer. There are mentions of "William Shakespeare," to be sure, but despite hundreds of years of research, there is not one that identifies William Shakespeare, the Stratford Man, as being the same person as William Shakespeare, the poet and playwright.

As one writer observed, "Armies of scholars, formidably equipped, have examined all the documents that could possibly contain at least a mention of Shakespeare's name. One hundreth of this labor applied to one of his insignificant contemporaries would be sufficient to produce a substantial biography. And yet the greatest of Englishmen, after this tremendous inquisition, remains so close to a mystery that even his identity can be doubted."

Answer: False

Many of the plays now attributed to the Stratford Man were published anonymously; some were published under the name of William Shakespeare; some were published under another person's name. Many plays which were sold with the name "William Shakespeare" on the title page or now known to have been written by someone other than the author of "Hamlet." Scholars still can't agree on what should or should not be included in the Shakespeare canon.

This seems to support the argument that "William Shakespeare" was simply a nom-de-plume for an author or group of authors who wished to remain unknown.

Answer: Litigation and speculation

The latter years of the Stratford Man's life are also the best documented. The surviving records do not paint a pretty picture. The Stratford Man emerges as a petty, vindictive, scheming, penny-pinching miser, a man who conspired with one of his friends to deprive the citizens of Stratford of their ancient grazing rights, who was constantly involved in petty lawsuits, and who once tried to get the village to reimburse him for two pints of wine given to a visiting cleryman.

He refused to pay a debt of forty shillings (about $10), money borrowed by his wife in his absence, and withheld grain from market in a time of scarcity, speculating on a rise in its price.

The Stratford Man revealed in the court records is precisely the kind of man most people would not want for a neighbor.

Answer: April 23, 1616

One of the few, unquestioned facts about the Stratford Man's life is when it came to an end.

Answer: None of them

The Stratford Man's death went unnoticed and unmourned. This in a time where the death of even a minor poet produced dozens of literary "memorials." There are, of course, many poems commemorating Shakespeare's death, but all were written many years after the Stratford Man died.

This fact, more than anything else, shows that English literary society knew that the Stratford Man was not the author of the poems and plays bearing the name of William Shakespeare. It was not until 1623, seven years after the Stratford Man's death, with the publication of the "First Folio," that anyone identified the Stratford Man with the works bearing the name WIlliam Shakespeare.

Answer: The bust is not the original

Go to Stratford Church, and above the Stratford Man's tomb you will see a crudely excecuted bust of a chubby man, described by one observer as looking like "a self-satisfied pork butcher." He has a cushion on his lap, holds a sheet of paper in his left hand, and a quill pen in his right.

This is not the bust which originally adorned the Stratford Man's final resting place. The original, which we know was sculpted by Gerard Johnson, showed a thin-faced man with a drooping moustache, holding not a pen and paper, but a bag of grain, tied up with rope. Engravings of the monument were made in 1646 and again in 1709, and show this quite clearly. By 1748 the original monument had fallen into disrepair. The citizens of Stratford, knowing that William Shakespeare, poet and playwright, was a better tourist draw than William Shakespeare, grain speculator, tore down the original bust and replaced it with the one seen today.

Answer: As a clown or a fraud

In 1587, William Camden published a history of England entitled simply, "Remains." In it, he makes mention of William Shakespeare as a writer, but there is nothing that links this Shakespeare to the Stratford Man. Dr. Altrochi discovered a marginal inscripton in a copy of this book belonging to the Huntington Shakespeare Library. On a page relating to Stratford, someone has written (in a hand that can be dated to c. 1600) the Latin phrase "Et Gulielmo Shakespeare Roscio plane nostro." This translates as "And William Shakespeare, our humble Roscius." The word "nostro" implies that the Stratford Man was alive at the time this note was written. Roscius was a Roman comic actor, a famous clown.

It is known that the Stratford Man worked as a comic actor. What is significant is that there is nothing to suggest the Stratford Man had any reputation as a writer, only as an actor. An alternative interpretation, by noted Marlovian advocate John Baker, has the inscription read "Et Gulielmo Shakespeare, Rescio plani nostro," which would translate as something like, "And thus I know our William Shakespeare to be an imposter."

Answer: Mark Twain

In his work, "Is Shakespeare Dead?", Twain makes a compelling case against the Stratford Man. I do not know who wrote the poems, sonnets and plays attributed to William Shakespeare, but I am absolutely certain it wasn't the man who has received credit for them for the past 400 years. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the best candidate is Christopher Marlowe.

But that's another story - and, perhaps, another quiz.