Edward de Vere & William Shakespeare

it is generally agreed that the play was created to celebrate a wedding in a noble household. There are two such occasions appropriate for this first performance. One is the wedding in 1595 of Elizabeth Vere, Lord Burghley’s granddaughter, to William Earl of Derby at Greenwich Palace

The work as a whole inverts the accepted order, elevating humans and human passions while making the gods and their desires and conquests objects of low humor.

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is influenced by the story of Pyramus and Thisbe (Metamorphoses Book 4), and, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a band of amateur actors performs a play about Pyramus and Thisbe. In Titus Andronicus the story of Lavinia's rape is drawn from Tereus' rape of Philomela, and the text of Metamorphoses is used within the play to enable Titus to interpret his daughter's story. Yet, most tellingly, Shakespeare adapts, with minor changes, a passage from Book 7 of the Golding translation into an important speech in Act V of the Tempest.

an extremely high number of surviving manuscripts (more than 400);[3] the earliest of these are three fragmentary copies containing portions of Books 1-3, dating to the ninth century.

J. Thomas Looney, British schoolmaster and scholar, evolved the theory of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford as author in his book, “Shakespeare” Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford

No one had any reason to doubt the Stratford man's authorship of the works during his lifetime because apparently nobody thought he wrote them in the first place!

“… when he died in 1616, no one seemed to notice. Not so much as a letter refers to the author's passing.”

Not until seven years after he died did a document appear pointing to him as the author. Nobody seems to have known who “Shakespeare” was, and most probably did not care. There is little reason to think that the author was a prominent person during his lifetime. The Stratford monument is so ambiguous that Stratford's residents had little to question. Some think it was originally erected as a monument to William's father, John Shakspere.