Roland Emmerich,Shakespeare And The Baconian Theory

So Shakespeare's plays were basically a popular entertainment of their day designed primarily to make money for the theatrical companies ,managers,actors and writers of which Shakespeare was all three.At the time Shakespeare does not seem to have been thought of as an exceptional individual , a poet on a par say with Virgil or Homer.This honour was conferred on him during subsequent centuries.His collected works were first published in the first folio seven years after his death.At that time there was little in the way of fiction published in the English language.Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,Malory's Morte D'Arthur , Sheldon's translation of Don Quixote ,Chapman s Homer and that would be about it.So for the literate in the country houses and rectories of the nation who would probably never see a play the complete works were no doubt a godsend.We are lucky that  Shakespeare's complete works survived .In my Jacobethan conversation earlier I mentioned Kyds Hamlet which was the precursor to that of Shakespeare.There is no surviving copy of this in existence so we have no idea what it was like anymore than we can know what the Colossus of Rhodes looked like.If there had been no complete edition of the plays we would perhaps have only a handful selected purely by chance,Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar perhaps with only the names left of other plays such as King Lear or Othello.