I'm no Shakespeare specialist either, but I thought it was pretty well
demonstrated decades ago that all of Shakespeare's so-called "intimate
knowledge" of this or that field (the law, the sea, how nobility lived,
etc.) was in fact the common knowledge of reasonably cultivated people
of his era.

As I recall, when the first serious study of Shakespeare's imagery was
done (by a woman named Bodkin?  My memory fails me) it turned out that
this reputedly high-falutin writer in fact drew more of his metaphors
and similes from SPORTS than from any other field--archery, falconry,
etc.

Henry James's famous advice to the young novelist was, "try to be one of
those upon whom nothing is lost."  Shakespeare has always struck me as
literature's greatest exemplar of James's dictum:  He took in what was
there for everyone else to take in.  He was a Sherlock Holmes of living,
while the rest of us muddle along like Dr. Watson.  Most of his
so-called special knowlege was really "elementary, my dear Watson."

Obviously Willy the Shake didn't write every line of every play
attributed to him--that's not how Elizabethan-Jacobean theater worked.
But I really don't think that most claimant cases hold up very well.

As for Bacon, can anyone who has slogged through his ponderous prose
truly imagine him writing A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM or TWELFTH NIGHT?
As the narrator of Twain's "1601" puts it, "Though the subject be but a
fart, yet will this tedious sink of learning ponderously philosophize."

Mark Coburn