Richard Shakespeare Richard Shakespeare Richard Shakespeare (1490 – before 10 February 1561) was a husbandman of Snitterfield, Warwickshire, north-northeast of Stratford-upon-Avon, the father of John Shakespeare and the grandfather of William Shakespeare. He was most likely born around the Rowington/Wroxall area, about to the north in Warwickshire. He was the son of John Shakespeare (1460–1521), and the grandson of Thomas Shakespeare (1430–1511), his mother was Joan Shakespeare. Sometime before 1529, he removed to Snitterfield, where he was a tenant farmer until his death on land owned by Robert Arden, the father of Mary Arden, who married John, the poet's father. Richard Shakespeare
History of the Shakespeare authorship question print that Shakespeare did not write the works bearing his name. Hart claimed that Shakespeare was a "mere "factotum" of the theatre", a "vulgar and unlettered man" hired to add obscene jokes to the plays of other writers. Hart does not suggest that there was any conspiracy, merely that evidence of the real authors's identities had been lost when the plays were published. Hart asserts that Shakespeare had been "dead for one hundred years and utterly forgotten" when old playscripts formerly owned by him were discovered and published under his name by Nicholas Rowe and Thomas Betterton. He speculates that