It's evident that Shakespeare received a very strong early grounding in what used to be known as the trivium: logic, grammar and rhetoric. These disciplines were taught in a style that we would now consider a thing of the past, perhaps even regressive. Exercises, drilling, memorization of terms - these approaches are frowned upon in our more enlightened times. Today, instruction is informed with educational jargon, which if looked at fairly and honestly, says very little, and accomplishes even less. In today's world, we'd be very lucky to find a high school student who could define such rhetorical terms as anaphora (repeating a word or phrase to start of successive clauses or lines), anadiplosis (repeating the final word of a phrase at the beginning of the next), and chiasmus (the repetition of two terms in reverse order), let alone use them. As Woody Allen once wrote (in a different context): This is progress? Here are examples of the figures listed above, all from Richard II, courtesy of the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare:

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England...

(2.1)

My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,

My soul the father . . .

(5.5)

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me...

(5.5)

If you are interested in Shakespeare, you will at several points in your travels have to deal with what has become known as the "authorship question". And it can be tiresome and frustrating, because it takes away from the entire point: the appreciation and enjoyment of the work. Sometimes, in fact, an interesting discussion can be marred by its very mention. When I'm asked my opinion, I usually say that if someone is accused of something (in this case, the most egregious example of intellectual theft imaginable), that at some point evidence must be produced, and since nothing of the kind has been, it's time to drop it. But I think that in the future, I'll amend my answer - and quote the following, from the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2001):

"The controversy has itself become an object of scholarly attention, as generations of Shakespearian critics have wondered why it should be so much easier to get into print with bizarre untruths about Shakespeare than with anything else on the subject. Many commentators have paid reluctant tribute to the sheer determination and ingenuity which 'anti-Stratfordian' writers have displayed—indeed, have invariably had to display, since any theory suggesting that the theatre professional William Shakespeare did not write the Shakespeare canon somehow has to explain why so many of his contemporaries said that he did (from Heminges, Condell, Jonson, and the other contributors to the Folio through Francis Meres and the Master of the Revels to the parish authorities of Holy Trinity in Stratford, to name only a few), and why none of the rest said that he did not. Most observers, however, have been more impressed by the anti-Stratfordians' dogged immunity to documentary evidence, not only that which confirms that Shakespeare wrote his own plays, but that which establishes that several of the alternative candidates were long dead before he had finished doing so. 'One thought perhaps offers a crumb of redeeming comfort,' observed the controversy's most thorough historian, Samuel Schoenbaum, 'the energy absorbed by the mania might otherwise have gone into politics.'"