Why do we find it so difficult to believe someone self-taught could have written the works of Shakespeare?

Question

This is not a question about who wrote the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare. It is rather a question of psychology relating to us living in the 20th and 21st centuries and our strange bias and elitism with regard to this matter. Why do we find it so difficult to believe that someone who had been neither to Oxford nor to Cambridge and was a "a brash actor/producer" could have written these works? Isn't it true that in Europe both before and during the Renaissance there were many who were self-taught or taught through apprenticeship rather than formal university schooling? What about Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo to name but a few? Since when is the university the best place to learn about human nature, the vicissitudes of the human condition and the foibles of men and women in positions both high and low?

Answer 1

Some of the greatest minds of all time have been self-taught individuals whose passions, hard work, and genius took them beyond anything that a formal university education could have ever offered. Even today, formal schooling essentially serves as a mere springboard into the individual’s own hidden talents. A genius is NOT made at school – a talented professional-to-be, perhaps. … As for “the Shakespeare dilemma”, the truth is, we cannot even be a 100% certain that whomever wrote all those plays and sonnets was in fact a man, much less a formally-trained man. For all we know, there is always a possibility that the true puppet master behind it all could have even been a woman, passing her literary and theatrical works to, as you put it, a "brash actor/producer". Remember, in Shakespeare’s era even the female role had to be portrayed by a male performer! … Arts and humanities, and in particular literature and philosophy, have traditionally been the domain of the passionately talented, self-taught, and self-motivated individual. In fact, it is highly unlikely that whoever that Shakespeare character really was, had picked up and polished his/her mastery of the English language in a formal/scholarly setting. Shakespeare not only had a genuine affinity for the “common man”, but also a profound insight into his/her mind - not exactly the sort of traits you are liable to master at a university. So even if we assume that Shakespeare was a formally trained scholar, the opulent resonance of the works themselves clearly attest to the fact that he/she must have completed at least a few self-taught semesters at the school of hard knocks. Go SOHK! :-)

Answer 2

Do you know the institution knowledge is a fallacy nothing comes from this taught of learning except common and the basic knowledge it is all a put on!
Here's proof of these facts
hay you place a street learner and a "University learner in a traumatic incident and that street man or as you put it self taught man shall survive and the other would rely totally on the man he would never have been in his company other wise!!
Experience is the best teacher! the earth is the class room!
these books are opinion based and others views you are to cling to! open for discussion and homework and assignments when the earth taught is definite and concrete!

Answer 3

Short answer to your Q:
Because the degree of specialization that is so widespread today, which even makes some people with a college degree feel unprepared and otherwise not learned enough instills the notion that he who is self taught cannot under any circumstance achieve or much less reinvent anything that the supposed learned folk have systematically strived to master and dominate.

Bye.

Answer 4

(If youre not educated no one listens to you) We live in a society where emphasis is placed on capitalizm. Certain things in our modern world has had its value diminished by a dollar amount. (Its all about the $profit$) College is one, rx's/cures are another just to name a few. ie...theres more money to be made in maintaining a disease than curing it.
because of this mind set we are conditioned to believe it is impossible to be educated without having a degree. you pay, so you get your degree so everyone sees you as intelligent. we forget that majority of our education comes from a life time of experience. experience breeds expanded, more colorful imaginations laced with a reality that sounds more propable if youre writing fiction. we think what we are conditioned to think.
so if you have no degree you cant possibly know what youre talking about.

Answer 5

I simply want to say,"Thank You". for the recognition of those who learn by a different school of discipline.