Who was Shakespeare?

I was coming home from Trivandrum last Saturday. As it was a 3 hour journey I had a Malayalam magazine along with IEEE Spectrum magazine which i got as my subscription from college. After reading the Malayalam magazine I just flipped through the spectrum magazine and was struck by a small article by Mr. Mark Anderson whom I was hearing for the very first time. Well, it was an article questioning the authorship of Shakespeare. The article focuses on the possibilities as proposed by early great minds of Freud, Mark Twain, Helen Keller etc. I messaged my sister friend vineetha and had a small discussion on it. As she is an expert in English language she was the best one to ask about it.

Some people say that it wasn't Shakespeare but Marlowe as Shakespeare was only 10 % literate. Some others say it is Queen Elizabeth. Hmm, quite debatable. According to many, Shakespeare was a make up  man !! The real intelligent and talented university wits never became popular.

Anyways what concerned me more wasn't this. From my childhood itself I am enlightened as Kaalidaasa is the Indian Shakespeare!! How pathetic is our plight under the European supremacy? How can we compare the supreme legend Kaalidaasa with Shakespeare? Well it may be okay if one says that Shakespeare is the English Kaalidaasa. But we Indians too are inclined to  say it the other way. Can we compare a single verse of Abhijnaana Shaakuntalam with any play of so called author Shakespeare? We all are still the intellectual slaves of the Englishmen. I don't mean that we should discard English. We should accept it and at the same time we should make efforts  and accept the beauty of our languages. Indian legends wont die at least in a single mind.