E X T E N S I O N DID SHAKESPEARE REALLY EXIST? Why is the question Did Shakespeare really exist? asked so often? Many people think he was too clever to have been born in Stratford and to have had no university education. As there are no surviving manuscripts of his plays, some scholars1 think they were destroyed to hide the identity of whoever wrote them. Who do they think this person could be? Francis Bacon, the philosopher or the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, a courtier, poet and patron of the arts? The Earl of Rutland, Christopher Marlowe? Ben Jonson? Or John Florio, the Italian/English scholar who translated Montaigne? Not only men: Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney and Emilia Bassano, the three most intelligent women of the age, have all been proposed as possible Shakespeares . On the other hand, Samuel Coleridge, the English Romantic poet, defended Shakespeare the man, when he wrote, He is of no age, nor of any religion or party or profession. His works come out of the unfathomable2 depths of his mind. As he said, genius is a mystery of nature which cannot be explained by birth or education. Luckily, quite a lot of information has been found which suggests that he did Ben Jonson. Edward de Vere. Mary Sidney. 1. scholars: people who know a lot about a particular subject. 2. unfathomable: too strange or difficult to be understood. 115