The education thing is actually an old issue. When the idea that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays first started coming up in the 19th century, it was heavily based on the education argument, which to some extent was possibly a proxy for British class issues- people in the nobility and upper classes not liking the idea that he wrote the plays. That aspect is still heavily present in a lot of the arguments about this.
Yes, I’ve heard the claim made that a man with ‘small Latin and smaller Greek’ (or however that went) could not have written Shakespeare’s plays; having read them, I don’t find the claim at all compelling, but my assumption is that by this point in the controversy, someone has compiled a representative selection of authors and estimated their education which would allow a direct empirical estimate of what the true correlation is.
The education thing is actually an old issue. When the idea that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays first started coming up in the 19th century, it was heavily based on the education argument, which to some extent was possibly a proxy for British class issues- people in the nobility and upper classes not liking the idea that he wrote the plays. That aspect is still heavily present in a lot of the arguments about this.
Yes, I’ve heard the claim made that a man with ‘small Latin and smaller Greek’ (or however that went) could not have written Shakespeare’s plays; having read them, I don’t find the claim at all compelling, but my assumption is that by this point in the controversy, someone has compiled a representative selection of authors and estimated their education which would allow a direct empirical estimate of what the true correlation is.