The dating of the Shakespeare plays is incredibly arbitrary and unknowable. Are you aware how thin an evidentiary foundation our knowledge of these issues rests on?
By "no one questioned" you mean "no one even referred to." Except for the preface of the First Folio.
A 16th-century alderman in Stratford is not an "educated" status. Most experts of any persuasion agree that Shakespeare's father was probably illiterate. He signed his name with a mark:
The classical education received by a top-tier nobleman of the time was far superior (at least in terms of Greek and Latin) to anything available today. The number of Englishmen who received this quality of education was incredibly small.
A better analogy might be, say, NFL quarterbacks. If I see someone who can win the Super Bowl at quarterback, and I'm not sure about his identity, I can be pretty sure he's spent most of his life training as a QB, was a high-school star and probably a college star, etc. That's going to be a pretty small set. If I have a data point that tells me that someone with a biography like mine was named Super Bowl MVP, my Bayesian trust in that data point is going to be pretty low.
By "no one questioned" you mean "no one even referred to." Except for the preface of the First Folio.
A 16th-century alderman in Stratford is not an "educated" status. Most experts of any persuasion agree that Shakespeare's father was probably illiterate. He signed his name with a mark:
http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/10-things-you-didn...
The classical education received by a top-tier nobleman of the time was far superior (at least in terms of Greek and Latin) to anything available today. The number of Englishmen who received this quality of education was incredibly small.
A better analogy might be, say, NFL quarterbacks. If I see someone who can win the Super Bowl at quarterback, and I'm not sure about his identity, I can be pretty sure he's spent most of his life training as a QB, was a high-school star and probably a college star, etc. That's going to be a pretty small set. If I have a data point that tells me that someone with a biography like mine was named Super Bowl MVP, my Bayesian trust in that data point is going to be pretty low.