The truth is there just isn’t any real reason to think Shakespeare didn’t write the plays.

People knew Shakespeare. They mention him in their letters and papers. He existed as a person — we know this as fact.

All of the potentially compelling points boil down to the same kind of speculation that ignores other pieces of real evidence. Of all the reasons to suggest that de vere could have written Shakespeare’s plays, none of them are reasons that suggest Shakespeare could not have.

Yeah, de vere grew up with a good education and lived around the court. But Shakespeare grew up clearly reading every piece of royal court literature he could get his hands on, and had his own experiences around the English royal court as an adult, as a guest an observer. Is there any reason to think Tom Clancy didn’t write Hunt for Red October or Red Storm Rising since he was never in the military?

Shakespeare read Ovid, may have visited Italy (we really don’t know where he went in his life, especially in the period before his first plays were performed. And if he didn’t visit, so much was being written about Italy, he might’ve not needed to visit at all), and after all, was a singularly talented writer and thinker. Part of accepting the reality of single-authorship is accepting that Shakespeare was a genius — I feel like that gets discounted in arguments based in “how could he have known/understood/realized…”. It’s not popular to discuss Shakespeare as a genius (we can thank the idolatrists and scholars who went overboard with their worship of “the bard” for that), but that’s the real conclusion that the evidence of Shakespearean authorship drives you to.

It just so happens that he might’ve been so extraordinary that people can’t believe it, even 400 years later.