Life of William Shakespeare of his plays, presumably as a selling point. There is a tradition that Shakespeare, in addition to writing many of the plays his company enacted and concerned with business and financial details as part-owner of the company, continued to act in various parts, such as the ghost of Hamlet's father, Adam in "As You Like It", and the Chorus in "Henry V". He appears to have moved across the River Thames to Southwark sometime around 1599. In 1604, Shakespeare acted as a matchmaker for his landlord's daughter. Legal documents from 1612, when the case was brought to trial, show that
History of the Shakespeare authorship question Faris al-Shidyaq, but developed seriously by Iraqi writer Safa Khulusi in the 1960s. It was later endorsed by Muammar Gaddafi. Such claims for a non-English origin for Shakespeare were linked to the expansion of his influence and popularity globally. Claimants have been detected in other countries, and he has even figured as a "contested heirloom", appropriated to various competing national or ethnic identities. His Englishness was first disputed in the wake of the Romantic "Shakespeare mania" ("Shakespearomanie") that swept Germany, and led to assertions of his Nordic character, and to claims that he was essentially German. However, no alternative German