LONDON, June 1 (UPI) -- Britain's leading theater gurus are engaged in a class battle over the true identity of the author behind Shakespeare's plays.
Mark Rylance, the outgoing artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, recently endorsed a theory the plays were composed by a team of writers, led by Francis Bacon and including Edward de Vere, the earl of Oxford.
But his successor, Dominic Dromgoole, has branded Rylance's theory "baloney" and its supporters "snobs."
He told Wednesday's Times of London the historical evidence indicates Shakespeare, a working-class playwright from Stratford, wrote the plays.
"People can't accept that he was working-class. They can't accept that his father was illiterate, and that he wasn't posh."
Rylance, chairman of the Shakespeare Authorship Trust, last year wrote he had difficulty reconciling the intellectualism in the plays with William Shakespeare's access to learning.
Professor Anne Barton, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, said the De Vere/Bacon theory was "a product of snobbery, that a Stratford grammar-school boy could not have written the plays, and I'm thoroughly fed up with it."
