WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
did not exist.

The epitaph on his Stratford grave is:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here. Blest be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones. 

Trying to curse the guy that attempts to catch a glimpse at the Great Bard's rotting guts, it is clear that Shakespeare doesn't have rotting guts because he was never alive.

Who wrote Hamlet then?

Francis Bacon.

Who the hell is that?

Exactly. Not exactly a credible name that sticks in your mind alongside the words:

The greatest user of the English Language.

So, he created a new name, namely Bill Shakespeare and drew this, you must agree, rough sketch to attain some kind of illusionary hold on an unsuspecting and "rankly abused" audience.


Stop believing the lie.

There is a snag though. A snag in my argument that Shakespeare did not exist. It relates to this image. Check the bags under his eyes. If Bacon whipped up a sketch, he must've had high ingenuity to add bags under the eyes. Perhaps, the above image is real, it is a likeness of a real person. And Shakespeare, if he was real, mustn't have slept, otherwise how could he complete so many plays? - thus, constituting the bags under the eyes.

The mystery continues.