As a newly emerging Victorian middle class arose and a liberal university education became the distinguishing mark of a gentleman, it became important for people to reinforce the superiority of their own lifestyle by thinking that Shakespeare's plays and poems could only have been the work of a university-educated gentleman rather than the genius of a somewhat self-taught middle-class glover's son.

The point that many scholars miss is that writing is about observing and reflecting the human condition. It is also about reading, and a great deal was being printed for the first time in English around Shakespeare's time. What's more, if you examine the careers of great writers throughout history, their formal academic education was the least relevant aspect of their success as a writer.

Many writers have come primarily from social classes below those of the ruling class. For example, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, and John Arden, all came from the working classes or middle classes. In pre-nineteenth-century times, John Webster was the son of a merchant tailor; Edmund Spenser's father was a cloth maker; Christopher Marlowe's father was a shoemaker in Canterbury; Ben Jonson's stepfather was a bricklayer.

While these promising young men were well educated at schools such as the Merchant Taylor's School in London and the Westminster School, not all went on to university.

Yet, these men had enough education to challenge the concept of “knowing their place” and to move to thinking “outside the box,” (as we would say today) and beyond society's expectations of them. So, they became writers in London. There, the theater, among other opportunities, provided them both employment and intellectual stimulation, and drew them into a world of urbane events. They either observed or became peripheral participants in the goings-on of kings and nobles, and were able to write compelling pictures of courtly life in their plays.