Adara is very right about genius. If it were all that easy to acquire, then all the zillions of English composition classes would have turned out brilliant writers. This seems NOT to have been the result of all those classes in writing.

I suspect part of the problem is that we think that degrees are meaningful in the sense that they train people to be "smarter" when all they do is denote a certain amount of decrease in ignorance. The only thing that feeds genius is experience. And as we all know, experience is bad because the only way you get it is by getting old. The other problem is that one has to innately possess the genius to begin with. Which is a concept Americans have a peculiar difficulty comprehending as it doesn't fit well with our bizarre notion that people are "equal." They might be equal before the law (an aspirational goal not always met in practice) but people are not and cannot be equal in talent.

Bacon and Oxford get credit for writing Shakespeare on the grounds that they had the education and he did not. That is exactly what I find most irritating about "scholars." You can't make an academic reputation by saying "William Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare." You only make a big rep by claiming it was somebody ELSE.

As to Marlowe, he was too busy being a spy for Queen Elizabeth to write Shakespeare!