More intelligent design for the english lit world.
Now that the previous pretender to the crown has been laid to rest, another kookoohead has proposed a new nobleman as the person who actually wrote Shakespeare's plays. This fellow really doesn't have very much going for him, aside from having a Sir in front of his name, but there's a certain subset of the educated world that, because of too much exposure to royalist twaddle at an impressionable age, just can't believe that the best english-language playwright of all time was some sort of jumped up middle class merchant instead of some perfumed lord with a title and an inheritance.
I don't pay much attention to the anyone-but-the-merchant! crowd (one of the advantages of growing up one generation away from farmers and millworkers, all of which were well educated and aware of the world, thank you very much, is that any claim that middle class writers are nothing more than uneducated simpletons is treated with the utter contempt it deserves), but of the, what, 12 or so people who've been announced as "the person who actually wrote Shakespeare's plays!™", all but one of them (was C. Marlowe ever a serious contender in this game?) have the necessary title and inheritance to fulfill the neeeed for an upper class twit for the abtm! to look up to.
It's creation science writ small; insecure people who think that because they can't do something that means that it takes a higher power to do it. Can't program your VCR? G-d must have done it. Can't write spectacularly beautiful plays and poems? An upper class twit (preferably one who has no works published under his own name) is obviously the one who's done it.
G-d help us if they ever figure out that Ben Jonson started out as a bricklayer.
(via Pharyngula;
you can also find more than you ever wanted to know about the authorship debate at Shakespeare Authorship)