Rasha’s review of Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature > Likes and Comments

She also highlights the evidence pointing to the fact that Shakespeare could not have created such a large body of work lacking as he was in education, legal knowledge, travel, and even awareness of women’s issues at that time (he never even taught his daughters how to read).

Winkler lied to you. Shakespeare's daughters were NOT illiterate, and his elder daughter, Susanna Hall, left behind two surviving signatures, which are presumptive evidence for literacy in an era when only one's signatures might survive. Hers did because Shakespeare set up a complex fee-tail scheme whereby Shakespeare's property was to go to any male issue, and failing that to his daughters. So when Susanna's husband Dr. John Hall died, and when her daughter Elizabeth's first husband, Thomas Nash, died, both of these events required a legal rearrangement of the estate that had to be signed. Susanna Hall's signature is on both documents, since they both affected her, and her daughter's signature is on the latter document. She also probably composed the Latin epitaph for Anne Shakespeare, which addresses her from the perspective of a child as "tu mater" ("you, mother"), was capable of describing the contents of one of her husband's books to a prospective buyer even though it was in Latin, and her own epitaph says that she was "Witty [learned] above her sex..." and adds that "Something of Shakespeare was in that...", showing that even as late as 1649 Shakespeare's name was a byword in Stratford for cleverness.

As for the rest of it, it's sheer speculation based on assuming that absence of evidence = evidence of absence that Shakespeare was lacking in any of those qualities. But, in fact, there is also an equal absence of evidence of notable erudition in the plays, a lack of erudition that was noted by all of his contemporaries and all other commentators who weighed in on the subject for the next +100 years. It is only now when people think you're a savant if you can but conjugate amāre and know the story of Apollo and Daphne that he's credited with a great deal of knowledge. For example, I was just reading Gerard Langbain's late 17th century work, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets, in which he wrote:

His Natural Genius to Poetry was so excellent, that like those Diamonds, which are found Cornwall, Nature had little or no occasion for the Assistance of Art to polish it. The Truth is, 'tis agreed on by most, that his Learning was not extraordinary....

Did Shakespeare need to travel in order to put alehouses in Sicily, Padua in Lombardy, and Milan and Verona on the Italian coastline? He didn't even bother to remain consistent from play to play. For example, The Two Gentlemen of Verona of the title go to Milan to visit their "emperor", the Duke, which implies that Verona was a vassal city of Milan. In fact, it never was—in Shakespeare's era it was a vassal city of the Venetian Republic—and in Shakespeare's era there was no local Milanese duke anyway. The last of the Milanese dukes was Francesco II Sforza, who died in 1535. After which the title of Duke of Milan was passed around the reigning houses of Europe until it wound up with the Spanish Hapsburgs. So had the two gentlemen wished to visit the Duke of Milan, they should have gone to Madrid where he was reigning as Felipe II. This also casts an interesting light on The Tempest, since Prospero was ousted as Duke of Milan, which would have necessitated his being removed as the King of Spain as well, but for some reason he's solely focused on the loss of one of his minor titles. But I digress. When Shakespeare next used Verona as a setting, it was famously in Romeo and Juliet, where Verona was now a principality (it never was) with a prince who was a speaking character in the play, Prince Escalus. The idea that travel was necessary for the bare minimum of local color that Shakespeare put into his plays (much of it wrong) is as absurd as assuming that John Fletcher had to don a ushanka and astrakhan coat in Russia to set The Loyal Subject in Moscow and wear a grass skirt and sarong in the East Indies when he set The Island Princess in the Moluccas (now part of Indonesia). By the same token, nobody thinks that Andy Weir was actually abandoned on the surface of Mars so that he could research The Martian.

Yes, Winkler presents such a contrast with the traditionalists, who would not permit us to question their authority about Shake-speare's identity. Like Diana Price, Winkler may feel we need to free ourselves from centuries of dogma about the real Shakespeare before we can think objectively about the (lack of) evidence supporting traditional theories about the author.

In contrast with Winkler, most of us who feel convinced about one or another alternative author spend relatively little time researching the various others.