Life must be filled up

This film sets out to show that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the Earl of Oxford. Oh yawn. Does it matter? To the tourist industry of Stratford on Avon, rather a lot, but to the rest of us? I think it does. What always strikes me about these crackpot theories is their snobbery. How likely is it, sniff the misguided critics, that a common boy from Stratford, with no more education than the local grammar school could provide, was able to write works of genius? The same argument could apply to Keats, or Dickens or Thomas Hardy but their lives are well documented and no one suggests that the poetry of the cockney Keats was actually written by Lord Byron. Who knows where genius will appear? Just look at the life of Michael Faraday.