Shakespeare was a common man from Warwickshire

The argument

The Stratfordian case rests less on documents than on what the plays themselves reveal about the man who wrote them. This literary sympathy for the masses indicates that Shakespeare was not some aristocrat or political insider; he was simply a glover's son from Stratford. An author writes most convincingly about the world he knows, and the sustained attention these plays give to servants, tradesmen and country people reads as familiarity rather than as condescension viewed from above. He also displays a strong familiarity with some of the grubbier aspects of Elizabethan life that would likely have been outside the realm of experience of the nobility. There is a scene in the histories where Shakespeare refers to the pestilence of fleas that gather in the corner of taverns near the 'jordan' where patrons relieved themselves between drinks. That is not the sort of detail a writer researches; it is the sort a writer has stood next to. The language points the same way, and more locally. Common Warwickshire vocabulary is evident in many of his plays. In Macbeth, Banquo is described as "blood bolter'd", meaning his hair was matted with blood, echoing the sentiment that in Warwickshire snow is said to balter on horses' feet — a dialect word carried from a particular place into the verse by someone who had grown up hearing it. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, he describes a "bank where the wild thyme grows", a scene that could have been pulled straight from the banks of the River Avon. Taken together, the sympathies, the grubby detail and the regional vocabulary all point to the same origin.

Context

You can tell from Shakespeare’s writing that the author has a nuanced ear and understanding of the cadence and manner in which common people converse.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The author does not have to be a commoner to have sympathies for the plights of the less fortunate; that is reverse snobbery. There is also considerable knowledge of the workings of English and European courts in the plays, and several working class characters are not treated very sympathetically. The scenes described are by no means unique to Warwickshire. In fact, there are many parts of England that could have produced the scenes mentioned in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth. Also, just because the author clearly has a strong understanding of the way normal people speak and a comprehension of some of the sleazier corners of Elizabethan life does not mean he was not an aristocrat or noble. It is perfectly possible to be of relatively high social standing but still be familiar with the working classes. The author clearly also has knowledge that a nobleman had infinitely more access to, such as travel experience, falconry, law, politics, history, medicine, and source texts that had not yet been translated into English.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The scenes described are not unique to Warwickshire. Ros Barber has shown that the plays do not use Warwickshire dialect.