Is Something Rotten in the Bard's Works?

Did William Shakespeare really write the plays attributed to him? The question remains the subject of an intense academic debate, NPR reports. Those who doubt the “man from Stratford” penned his plays point to a lame rhyming epitaph on the supposed bard’s headstone, and to lack of documents tying him to his works—or even suggesting he was a writer.

All documents, says one premier Shakespeare doubter, “speak to the activity of a man who is principally a businessman. … We don't have anyone attesting to him as a playwright, as a poet. And he's the only presumed writer of his time for whom there is no contemporary evidence of a writing career. Many of us find that rather astonishing." (More William Shakespeare stories.)