WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S STYLE, REPUTATION & AUTHORSHIP:

Style

Detail from statue of Shakespeare in Leicester Square, London.
Shakespeare's works have been a major influence on subsequent theatre. Not only did Shakespeare create some of the most admired plays in Western literature, he also transformed English theatre by expanding expectations about what could be accomplished through characterisation, plot, action, language, and genre.[22] His poetic artistry helped raise the status of popular theatre, permitting it to be admired by intellectuals as well as by those seeking pure entertainment.
Theatre was changing when Shakespeare first arrived in London in the late 1580s or early 1590s. Previously, the most common forms of popular English theatre were the Tudor morality plays. These plays, which blend piety with farce and slapstick, were allegories in which the characters are personified moral attributes who validate the virtues of Godly life by prompting the protagonist to choose such a life over evil. The characters and plot situations are symbolic rather than realistic. As a child, Shakespeare would likely have been exposed to this type of play (along with mystery plays and miracle plays).[23] Meanwhile, at the universities, academic plays were being staged based on Roman closet dramas. These plays, often performed in Latin, used a more exact and academically respectable poetic style than the morality plays, but they were also more static, valuing lengthy speeches over physical action.
By the late 16th century, the popularity of morality and academic plays waned as the English Renaissance took hold, and playwrights like Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe began to revolutionise theatre. Their plays blended the old morality drama with academic theatre to produce a new secular form. The new drama had the poetic grandeur and philosophical depth of the academic play and the bawdy populism of the moralities. However, it was more ambiguous and complex in its meanings, and less concerned with simple moral allegories. Inspired by this new style, Shakespeare took these changes to a new level, creating plays that not only resonated on an emotional level with audiences but also explored and debated the basic elements of what it means to be human.

Reputation
Main article: Shakespeare's reputation
Shakespeare's reputation has grown considerably since his own time. During his lifetime and shortly after his death, Shakespeare was well-regarded but not considered the supreme poet of his age. He was included in some contemporary lists of leading poets, but he lacked the stature of Edmund Spenser or Philip Sidney. After the Interregnum stage ban of 1642–1660, the new Restoration theatre companies had the previous generation of playwrights as the mainstay of their repertory, most of all the phenomenally popular Beaumont and Fletcher team, but also Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. As with other older playwrights, Shakespeare's plays were mercilessly adapted by later dramatists for the Restoration stage with little of the reverence that would later develop.
Beginning in the late 17th century, Shakespeare began to be considered the supreme English-language playwright (and, to a lesser extent, poet). Initially this reputation focused on Shakespeare as a dramatic poet, to be studied on the printed page rather than in the theatre. By the early 19th century, though, Shakespeare began hitting peaks of fame and popularity. During this time, theatrical productions of Shakespeare provided spectacle and melodrama for the masses and were extremely popular. Romantic critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge then raised admiration for Shakespeare to adulation or bardolatry (from bard + idolatry), in line with the Romantic reverence for the poet as prophet and genius. In the middle to late 19th century, Shakespeare also became an emblem of English pride and a "rallying-sign", as Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1841, for the whole British Empire.
This reverence has provoked an unforeseen negative reaction in the youth. In the 21st century most people in the English-speaking world encounter Shakespeare at school at a young age, and there is an association by some students of his work with boredom beyond comprehension and of "high art" not easily appreciated by popular culture; an ironic fate considering the social mix of Shakespeare's audience. Nonetheless, Shakespeare's plays remain more frequently staged than the works of any other playwright and are frequently adapted into film—including Hollywood movies specifically marketed to broad teenage audiences, though many simply take credit for his plots rather than his narrative. Famously, Shakespeare's plays are often transferred to a different environment even when retaining his dialogue.
On another level, many modern English words and phrases that are taken for granted were introduced by Shakespeare.
See also: Timeline of Shakespeare criticism

Speculations about Shakespeare

Authorship
Main article: Shakespearean authorship
Around one hundred and fifty years after Shakespeare's death in 1616, doubts began to be expressed by some researchers about the authorship of the plays and poetry attributed to him. The terms Shakespearean authorship, and the Shakespeare Authorship Question normally refer to the debates inspired by these researchers, who consider the works to have been written by another playwright using either William Shakespeare, or the hyphenated "Shake-speare", as a pen-name.
Admirers of Shakespeare's works are often disappointed by the lack of available information about the author. In "Who Wrote Shakespeare" (1996), John Mitchell notes "The known facts about Shakespeare's life ... can be written down on one side of a sheet of notepaper." He cites Mark Twain's satirical expression of the same point in the section "Facts" in "Is Shakespeare Dead" (1909).
Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, an English nobleman and intimate of Queen Elizabeth, remains the most prominent alternative candidate for authorship of the Shakespeare canon, having been identified in the 1920s and further researched in the 1980's. Oxford partisans note his literary reputation, education and travels, as well as striking similarities between the Earl's life, and events depicted in the plays and sonnets. The principal hurdle for the Oxfordian theory is the conventional theory that many of the Shakespeare plays were written after Oxford's death (1604), but well within the lifespan of William Shakespeare. Oxfordians counter this argument by citing research that suggests "Shakespeare" actually stopped writing in 1604, the same year that regular publication of Shakespeare's plays stopped. Christopher Marlowe is considered by some to be the most highly qualified to have written the works of Shakespeare. It has been speculated that Marlowe's recorded death in 1593 was faked for various reasons and that Marlowe went into hiding, subsequently writing under the name of William Shakespeare; this is called the Marlovian theory. Sir Francis Bacon is another proposed author for the Shakespeare works. Besides having travelled to some of the countries in which the plays are set, he could also have read the Shakespeare sources in their original Greek, Italian, Hebrew, or French. He described himself as a "Concealed Poet" and was alive at the time of the publication of the First Folio in 1623. Arguments against Bacon include the suggestion that he had no time to write so many plays, and that his style is different from Shakespeare's.
A question in mainstream academia addresses whether Shakespeare himself wrote every word of his commonly accepted plays, given that collaboration between dramatists routinely occurred in the Elizabethan theatre. Serious academic work continues to attempt to ascertain the authorship of plays and poems of the time, both those attributed to Shakespeare and others.