Although Shakespearean experts disparaged Ogburn's methodology and his conclusions, one reviewer, Richmond Crinkley, the Folger Shakespeare Library's former director of educational programs, acknowledged the appeal of Ogburn's approach, writing that the doubts over Shakespeare, " arising early and growing rapidly ", have a " simple, direct plausibility ", and the dismissive attitude of established scholars only worked to encourage such doubts.

However, this attribution is not generally accepted by experts on Shakespeare.

Relying on the internal evidence of the text, Foster argued that Shakespeare could be the author and submitted a manuscript about the Elegy to Oxford University Press, but two experts recommended against publication on the grounds that such evidence was insufficient to establish authorship.

In his letter mentioning Shakespeare on January 24, 1597/8, Sturley asked Quiney especially that `` theare might ( be ) bi Sir Ed. Grev. some meanes made to the Knightes of the Parliament for an ease and discharge of such taxes and subsedies wherewith our towne is like to be charged, and I assure u I am in great feare and doubte bi no meanes hable to paie.

Shakespeare: " Sir Toby Belch: She's a beagle, true-bred, and one that adores me: what o ' that?

As well as stories from the Old Testament, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, she grew up with Aesop ’ s Fables, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, the folk tales and mythology of Scotland, the German Romantics, Shakespeare, and the romances of Sir Walter Scott.

Elizabeth's reign is known as the Elizabethan era, famous above all for the flourishing of English drama, led by playwrights such as William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, and for the seafaring prowess of English adventurers such as Sir Francis Drake.

Sir John Falstaff is a fictional character who appears in three plays by William Shakespeare.

The Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship, first proposed in the mid-19th century, contends that Sir Francis Bacon wrote some or all the plays conventionally attributed to William Shakespeare, in opposition to the scholarly consensus that William Shakespeare of Stratford was the author.

She also read the plays of William Shakespeare, and novels by Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott.

In 1921, Sir George Greenwood, Looney, and others founded The Shakespeare Fellowship, an organization originally dedicated to the discussion and promotion of ecumenical anti-Stratfordian views, but which later became devoted to promoting Oxford as the true Shakespeare.

More was portrayed as a wise and honest statesman in the 1592 play Sir Thomas More, which was probably written in collaboration by Henry Chettle, Anthony Munday, William Shakespeare, and others, and which survives only in fragmentary form after being censored by Edmund Tylney, Master of the Revels in the government of Queen Elizabeth I ( any direct reference to the Act of Supremacy was censored out ).

Cymbeline was also performed in Cambridge in October 2007 in a production directed by Sir Trevor Nunn, who sought to re-capture the essence of the play as a story narrative, and in November 2007 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre.

and Francis Beaumont were among the members ( although it is often asserted that William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh were members of this club, there is no documented evidence to support this claim ).

In Puck, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, the once-dangerous figure is rendered harmless

Other possible sources are the anonymous play King Leir ( published in 1605 ); A Mirror for Magistrates ( 1574 ), by John Higgins ; The Malcontent ( 1604 ), by John Marston ; The London Prodigal ( 1605 ); Arcadia ( 1580 – 1590 ), by Sir Philip Sidney, from which Shakespeare took the main outline of the Gloucester subplot ; Montaigne's Essays, which were translated into English by John Florio in 1603 ; An Historical Description of Iland of Britaine, by William Harrison ; Remaines Concerning Britaine, by William Camden ( 1606 ); Albion's England, by William Warner, ( 1589 ); and A Declaration of egregious Popish Impostures, by Samuel Harsnett ( 1603 ), which provided some of the language used by Edgar while he feigns madness.

The source used by Shakespeare was Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Life of Brutus and Life of Caesar

Sir Peter Hall was appointed artistic director ( designate ) in 1959, and formed the Royal Shakespeare Company ( RSC ) in 1961.

The Shrieves House is one of the oldest still lived in houses in the town and Shakespeare is said to have based his character of Sir John Falstaff on one of the residents, his godson's uncle.

Highlights of his career in modern theatre include the roles of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons ( 1960 ), Charles Dyer in Dyer's play Staircase, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966, the definitive Laurie in John Osborne's A Hotel in Amsterdam ( 1968 ), and Antonio Salieri in the original stage production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus ( 1979 ).

He and his friend Sir Thomas Wyatt were the first English poets to write in the sonnet form that Shakespeare later used, and Surrey was the first English poet to publish blank verse in his translation of the second and fourth books of Virgil's Aeneid.

The Brief Lives includes biographies of such figures as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, John Dee, Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Halley, Ben Jonson, Thomas Hobbes, and William Shakespeare.

Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare helped popularize the sonnet.

During the latter part of his career, celebrated actor John Barrymore starred in a radio program, Streamlined Shakespeare, which featured him in a series of one-hour adaptations of Shakespeare plays, many of which Barrymore never appeared in either on stage or in films, such as Twelfth Night ( in which he played both Malvolio and Sir Toby Belch ), and Macbeth.

In 1789 George Dance invented an Ammonite Order, a variant of Ionic substituting volutes in the form of fossil ammonites for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall, London.

It is generally believed that Shakespeare originally named Falstaff " John Oldcastle ", and that Lord Cobham, a descendant of the historical John Oldcastle, complained, forcing Shakespeare to change the name.

Katherine Duncan-Jones accepts a 1600 – 1 attribution for the date Hamlet was written, but notes that the Lord Chamberlain's Men, playing Hamlet in the 3000-capacity Globe, were unlikely to be put to any disadvantage by an audience of " barely one hundred " for the Children of the Chapel's equivalent play, Antonio's Revenge ; she believes that Shakespeare, confident in the superiority of his own work, was making a playful and charitable allusion to his friend John Marston's very similar piece.

Reynolds made extracts in his commonplace book from Theophrastus, Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Antonius, Ovid, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Aphra Behn and passages on art theory by Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy, and André Félibien.

John Cargill Thompson's play Macbeth Speaks 1997, a reworking of his earlier Macbeth Speaks, is a monologue delivered by the historical Macbeth, aware of what Shakespeare and posterity have done to him.

Students received the usual quota of Plutarch, Shakespeare, Swift, and Addison, as well as such Americans as Joel Barlow's Vision of Columbus, Timothy Dwight's Conquest of Canaan, and John Trumbull's poem M ' Fingal.

Two professors of linguistics have claimed that de Vere wrote not only the works of Shakespeare, but most of what is memorable in English literature during his lifetime, with such names as Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Philip Sidney, John Lyly, George Peele, George Gascoigne, Raphael Holinshed, Robert Greene, Thomas Phaer, and Arthur Golding being among dozens of further pseudonyms of de Vere.

Dr. John Ward's 1662 diary entry stating that Shakespeare wrote two plays a year " and for that had an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of £ 1, 000 a year " as a critical piece of evidence, since Queen Elizabeth I gave Oxford an annuity of exactly £ 1, 000 beginning in 1586 that was continued until his death.

However, other scholars have found Grillo's arguments unpersuasive, arguing that Shakespeare could have derived much of this material from John Florio, an Italian scholar living in England who was later thanked by Ben Jonson for helping him get Italian details right for his play Volpone.

Shakespeare omitted the character of the traitorous Robert de Vere, 3rd Earl of Oxford in The Life and Death of King John, and the character of the 12th Earl of Oxford is given a much more prominent role in Henry V than his limited involvement in the actual history of the times would allow.

* Iambic pentameter ( John Milton in Paradise Lost, William Shakespeare in his Sonnets )

Puns and other forms of word play have been used by many famous writers, such as Alexander Pope, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Bloch, Lewis Carroll, John Donne, and William Shakespeare, who is estimated to have used over 3, 000 puns in his plays.

William Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, was one such inspector.

The conceit of dramatising Shakespeare writing Romeo and Juliet has been used several times, including John Madden's 1998 Shakespeare in Love, in which Shakespeare writes the play against the backdrop of his own doomed love affair.

Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, descended from a staunch Catholic family, and his father, John Shakespeare, was listed as a Catholic recusant.

Bradbury claimed a wide variety of influences, and described discussions he might have with his favorite poets and writers Robert Frost, William Shakespeare, John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, and Thomas Wolfe.

* 1950: John Gielgud played Cassius at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre under the direction of Michael Langham and Anthony Quayle.

Notable more recent productions of Measure for Measure are Charles Laughton as Angelo at the Old Vic Theatre in 1933, Peter Brook's 1950 staging at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre with John Gielgud as Angelo, and a 1976 New York Shakespeare Festival production featuring Meryl Streep as Isabella and John Cazale as Angelo.

Their Shakespeare adaptations included a one-hour Macbeth starring Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson, and a ninety-minute Hamlet, starring John Gielgud.

In 1952 he appeared at the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre ( forerunner of the Royal Shakespeare Company ) but had mixed reviews: his Prospero in The Tempest was judged too prosaic, and his Macbeth, directed by Gielgud, was thought unconvincingly villainous (" Richardson's playing of Macbeth suggests a fatal disparity between his temperament and the part ").

Gielgud acted in all four productions and directed the two Shakespeare plays, while Tyrone Guthrie directed The School for Scandal and Michael Saint-Denis staged Three Sisters.

As he aged, Gielgud sought out distinctive new voices in the theatre, appearing in plays by Edward Albee ( Tiny Alice ), Alan Bennett ( Forty Years On ), Charles Wood ( Veterans ), Edward Bond ( Bingo, in which Gielgud played William Shakespeare ), David Storey ( Home ), and Harold Pinter ( No Man's Land ), the latter two in partnership with his old friend Ralph Richardson, but he drew the line at being offered the role of Hamm in Beckett's Endgame, saying that the play offered " nothing but loneliness and despair ".

In 1978 he played in the BBC Television Shakespeare production of Richard II, with Sir John Gielgud and Dame Wendy Hiller.

** John Gielgud for Ages of Man-Readings From Shakespeare

* 1950 Measure for Measure with John Gielgud ( Shakespeare Memorial Theatre )

* 1952 The Winter's Tale with John Gielgud ( Shakespeare Memorial Theatre )

Benson's at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1910, Robert Atkins ' 1926 production at the Apollo Theatre, starring John Gielgud, or Ben Iden Payne's 1938 production at Stratford-upon-Avon.

** John Gielgud for Ages of Man-Readings From Shakespeare

Notable actors who have portrayed Shylock include Richard Burbage in the 16th century, Charles Macklin in 1741, Edmund Kean in 1814, William Charles Macready in 1840, Edwin Booth in 1861, Henry Irving in 1880, George Arliss in 1928, John Gielgud in 1937, Laurence Olivier at the Royal National Theatre in 1972 and on TV in 1973, Patrick Stewart in 1965 at the Theatre Royal, Bristol and 1978, plus ( as Shylock ) in a one-man stage show Mr. Stewart developed entitled " Shylock: Shakespeare's Alien " in 1987 and 2001, Al Pacino in a 2004 feature film version as well as in Central Park in 2010, and F. Murray Abraham at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2006.

Gielgud directed a production at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre with Laurence Olivier as Malvolio and Vivien Leigh playing both Viola and Sebastian in 1955.

The Royal Shakespeare Company / BBC TV, black and white, Peggy Ashcroft plays Ranevskaya, Ian Holm plays Trofimov, John Gielgud Gaev, Judi Dench Anya, Dorothy Tutin Varya, production by Michel Saint-Denis, directed by Michael Elliott, 1962, released on DVD by BBC Worldwide Ltd 2009.

In 1925, Baylis began a campaign to re-open the derelict Sadler's Wells Theatre, something she finally achieved with a gala opening, on 6 January 1931, of a production of Shakespeare ’ s Twelfth Night starring John Gielgud as Malvolio and Ralph Richardson as Toby Belch.

Pacino also features other actors famous for performing Shakespeare, such as Vanessa Redgrave, Kenneth Branagh, John Gielgud, Derek Jacobi, James Earl Jones, and Kevin Kline.

His theatre roles included Yasha in The Cherry Orchard and Henry Percy ( Hotspur ) in Richard II both for John Gielgud, Exton in Richard II and Volscian Senator in Coriolanus ( Almeida Theatre ), Marley's Ghost in A Christmas Carol ( Royal Shakespeare Company ) and Uncle in Inner Voices ( Royal National Theatre ), as well as working extensively at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester.

At the time of his death, Toone was one of the last survivors of the Old Vic theatre company of the 1930s, having appeared alongside the likes of John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier in productions of Shakespeare.

The declaration named 20 prominent doubters of the past, including Mark Twain, Orson Welles, John Gielgud and Charlie Chaplin and was made by Shakespeare Authorship Coalition duly signed online by 300 people to begin a new research.

John Gielgud had played Mark Antony at the Old Vic Theatre in 1930 and Cassius at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1950, James Mason had played Brutus at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in the 1940s, and John Hoyt, who plays Decius Brutus, also played him in the 1937 stage version.