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Shakespeare Authorship Authors: The Short List


 Shakespeare Authorship Authors


The Short List

There’s Sir Francis ‘Shakespeare’ Bacon
Whose works are now largely forsaken,
          Yet did he once write
          Some views erudite
“On the Theatrical Art of Fakin’”?

Or it’s obviously Edward de Vere
If we would but persevere,
          The author whom Freud
          Believed fill the void
Of that ghost by the family name Shakespeare.

Our old friends Beaumont and Fletcher
Coloured in Shakespeare’s sketches;
          He made the pastry
          They filled with tasty
Cut-and-come-again fillings, I betcha.

There’s that devilish Christopher Marlowe
Wrote the lot from his villa in Como,
          Once the plot was hatched
          And he was dispatched
Smuggled them home sans embargo.

Or perhaps it was all Edmund Spenser,
A man with top marks in Mensa,
          Kept plays in a drawer
          Of years a full score
Then released one per year, each intenser.

And it stands to reason Queen Elizabeth
Had a hand before, midst, and after death;
          While the name King James
          Will have its own claims:
Writing committees but lived on his breath.

If the Bard was female Mary Sidney
Stands a chance and those of her kidney
          Though if Will was such
          They’re not saying much
And the corpus was very well-hidney.

Fairly clearly it’s not Edward Lear
Wrong century, or so it appears.
          T.S. Eliot?
          Don’t be an idiot!
They breathed a different atmosphere.

But a late-runner is Harold Bloom
If all time is compressed in a zoom;
          Shakespeare, it’s been said,
          Was all in his head
And the truth will not out until Doom.


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