Talk:Shakespeare authorship question/Overlapping history

Shakespeare surrounded by (clockwise from top left):Oxford, Bacon, Derby and Marlowe, all of whom have been nominated as the true author.

The Shakespeare authorship question is the argument that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works traditionally attributed to him, and that the historical Shakespeare was merely a front to shield the identity of the real author or authors, who because of some disabling characteristic—social rank, state security, gender, or some other reason—could not safely take public credit.

The basis for the idea can be traced to the 18th century, when more than 150 years after his death Shakespeare’s status as an accomplished dramatist and poet was elevated to that of the greatest artistic genius of all time. To 19th-century Romanticists, who believed that literature was basically self-expression, Shakespeare’s eminence seemed incongruous with his humble origins and obscure life, which aroused suspicion that the Shakespeare attribution was possibly a deception. Public debate and a prolific body of literature of the idea dates to the mid-19th century, and numerous historical figures have been nominated as the true author since, including Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe and William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby.

Although the idea has attracted much public interest, all but a few Shakespeare scholars and literary historians consider it a fringe theory with no evidence and for the most part disregard it except to refute or disparage the claims. Nearly all academic scholars accept that William Shakespeare was the primary author of the canon, and they deny the validity of the various alternative authorship theories almost unanimously.

Promoters of various authorship theories assert that their own candidate is more suitable as the author in terms of education, life experience, or social status. They argue that the documented life of William Shakespeare lacks the education, aristocratic sensibility, or familiarity with the royal court they claim is apparent in the works.

Mainstream Shakespeare scholars consider biographical interpretations of literature as unreliable (at best) for attributing authorship, and that the convergence of documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s authorship—title pages, testimony by other contemporary poets and historians, and official records—is the same as that for any other author of the time. No such supporting evidence exists for any other candidate, and Shakespeare’s authorship was not questioned during his lifetime or for centuries after his death.

Despite the scholastic consensus, a relatively small but highly visible and diverse assortment of supporters, including some prominent public figures, are confident that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote the works. They campaign assiduously to gain public acceptance of the authorship question as a legitimate field of academic inquiry and to promote one or another of the various authorship candidates through publications, organizations, online discussion groups and conferences.

Overview

Note: In compliance with the accepted jargon used within the Shakespeare authorship question, this article uses the term "Stratfordian" to refer to the position that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the primary author of the plays and poems traditionally attributed to him. The term "anti-Stratfordian" is used to refer to those who believe that some other author actually wrote the works.

The anti-Stratfordian thesis and argument

The body of work known as the Shakespeare canon is universally considered to be of the highest artistic and literary quality. The works exhibit such great learning, profound wisdom, and intimate knowledge of the Elizabethan and Jacobean court and politics, anti-Stratfordians say, that no one but a noble or highly-educated court insider could have written them. In addition, anti-Stratfordians consider the Shakespeare's works themselves as evidence for attribution. They find similarities between the characters and events portrayed in the plays and the biography of their preferred candidates, and they also search for literary parallels between the works and the known literary works of their candidate. The historical documentary remains of William Shakespeare of Stratford (separate from all literary records and commentary) consist of mundane personal records—vital records of his birth, marriage, and death, tax records, lawsuits to recover debts, and real estate transactions—and lacks any documented record of education, which anti-Stratfordians say indicate a person very far from the author reflected in the works.

All anti-Stratfordian arguments share several common characteristics. They all attempt to disqualify William Shakespeare as the author due to perceived inadequacies in his education or biography; they all offer supporting arguments for a more acceptable substitute candidate; and they all postulate some type of conspiracy to protect the author's true identity to account for the historical evidence supporting William Shakespeare as the author and to explain the absence of any supporting documented evidence for any other person.

Standards of evidence

At the core of the argument about Shakespeare's authorship is the nature of acceptable evidence used to attribute works to their authors. Anti-Stratfordians argue the cases for their respective candidates through the use of parallel passages, biographical readings of the works, hidden codes and cryptographic allusions they find in the texts, or all of these, which they designate as circumstantial evidence. Academic Shakespeareans and literary historians rely on the documentary evidence in the form of title page attributions, government records such as the Stationers' Register and the Accounts of the Revels Office, and contemporary testimony from poets, historians, and those players and playwrights who worked with him, as well as modern stylometric studies, all of which converging evidence affirms William Shakespeare's authorship. These criteria are the same used to credit works to other authors and are accepted as the standard methodology for authorship attribution.

Arguments against Shakespeare's authorship

Very little is known about the personal lives of some of the most prolific and popular Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, such as Thomas Kyd, George Chapman, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Thomas Dekker, Philip Massinger, and John Webster, while more is known about other playwrights of the time, such as Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and John Marston, because of their educational records, close connections with the court or run-ins with the law. In the case of William Shakespeare, however, the lacunae in his biography are used to draw inferences which are then treated as circumstantial evidence to argue against his fitness as an author. This method of arguing from an absence of evidence, common to almost all anti-Stratfordian theories, is known as argumentum ex silentio, or argument from silence. Further, this gap has been taken by some as evidence for a conspiracy to expunge all traces of Shakespeare from the historical record by a government intent in perpetuating the cover-up of the true author’s identity (such as destroying the records of the Stratford grammar school to hide the fact that Shakespeare didn’t attend).

Shakespeare's background

John Shakespeare's house, believed to be Shakespeare's birthplace, in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Stratford-upon-Avon • Shakespeare was born, raised, married, and died in Stratford-upon-Avon, a market town about 100 miles northwest of London with around 1,500 residents at the time of his birth, and kept a household there during his London career. The town was a centre for the slaughter, marketing, and distribution of sheep and wool, as well as tanning, and produced an Archbishop of Canterbury and a Lord Mayor of London. Anti-Stratfordians often portray the town as an illiterate cultural backwater lacking the necessary environment to nurture a genius such as Shakespeare, and from the earliest days anti-Stratfordians have often depicted him as greedy, stupid, and illiterate.

Family • Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, was a glover and town official who married Mary Arden, one of the Ardens of Warwickshire, a family of the local gentry. Both signed their names with a mark, and no other examples of their writing are extant. This is often used to assert that Shakespeare was raised in an illiterate home. Also there is no evidence that Shakespeare's two daughter's were literate, save for one signature by Susanna that appears to be "drawn" and not written. His other daughter, Judith, signed with a mark.

Anti-Stratfordians say that Shakespeare's background is incompatible with the cultured author displayed in the Shakespeare canon, which exhibits an intimacy with court politics and culture, foreign countries, and aristocratic sports such as hunting, falconry, tennis and lawn-bowling. Many argue that the works show little sympathy for upwardly mobile types such as John Shakespeare and his son, and that Shakespeare's plays portray individual commoners comically and as objects of ridicule and groups of commoners alarmingly, if congregated in mobs.

Shakespeare's education and literacy

Shakespeare’s signatures have often been cited as evidence for his illiteracy.

Shakespeare's literacy or lack of it is a staple of many anti-Stratfordian arguments, as well as the lack of documentary evidence for his education.

Education • The King's New School in Stratford, a free school chartered in 1553, was about a quarter of a mile from Shakespeare's home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the curriculum was dictated by law throughout England, and the school would have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar, the classics, and rhetoric. The headmaster, Thomas Jenkins, and the instructors were Oxford graduates.

No attendance records of the period survive, so if Shakespeare attended the school it cannot be documented, nor did anyone who taught or attended the school ever claim to have been his teacher or classmate. This lack of documentation is taken as evidence by many anti-Stratfordians that Shakespeare had little or no education.

Vocabulary • Anti-Stratfordians also find it incredible that William Shakespeare of Stratford, apparently lacking the education and cultured background displayed in the works bearing his name, could have attained the extensive vocabulary used in the plays and poems, which is calculated to be between 17,500 to 29,000 words.

Signatures • No letters or signed manuscripts written by Shakespeare survive. Shakespeare's six authenticated signatures are written in secretary hand, a style of handwriting that vanished by 1700, and he used breviographs to abbreviate his surname in three of them. The appearance of Shakespeare's surviving signatures, which anti-Stratfordians have characterised as "scratchy" and "an illiterate scrawl", is taken as evidence that he was illiterate or just barely literate.

Shakespeare's name as a pseudonym

Hyphenated "SHAKE-SPEARE" on the cover of the Sonnets (1609)

In his surviving signatures William Shakespeare did not spell his name as it appears on most Shakespeare title pages. His surname was also spelled inconsistently in both literary and non-literary documents, with the most variation observed in those that were written by hand. This is also taken as evidence that he was not the same person who wrote the works attributed to William Shakespeare and that the name was used as a pseudonym for the true author.

Shakespeare's surname was hyphenated as "Shake-speare" or "Shak-spear" in 15 of the 48 editions of Shakespeare's plays (16 were published with the author unnamed) and in two of the five editions of poetry published before the First Folio, as well as in six literary allusions published between 1594 and 1623 and in one cast list. 13 of these 15 editions consist of just three plays. Many anti-Stratfordians take the use of a hyphen to indicate a pseudonym, with the reasoning that fictional descriptive names were often hyphenated in plays (such as "Master Shoe-tie" and "Sir Luckless Woo-all") and pseudonyms were also sometimes hyphenated, such as "Tom Tell-truth" and "Martin Marprelate" and its satirical variants.

The reasons given for the assertion that "Shakespeare" is a pseudonym vary, usually depending upon the social status of the candidate. Aristocrats such as Derby and Oxford supposedly used pseudonyms because of a prevailing "stigma of print", a social convention that restricted their literary works to private and courtly audiences—as opposed to commercial endeavors—at the risk of social disgrace if violated. In the case of commoners, the reason was to avoid prosecution by the authorities—Bacon to avoid the consequences of advocating a more republican form of government; Marlowe to avoid imprisonment or worse after faking his death and fleeing the country.

Ben Jonson’s “On Poet-Ape” from his collected works published in 1616 is taken by some anti-Stratfordians to refer to William Shakespeare

Missing documentary evidence

Evidence for Shakespeare as an author • Anti-Stratfordian theories claim that if the name on the plays and poems and literary references, "William Shakespeare", is assumed to be a pseudonym, then nothing in the documentary record left behind by William Shakespeare of Stratford explicitly names him as the author. The evidence instead supports a career as a profit-seeking businessman and real estate investor, and any prominence he might have had in the London theatrical world (aside from his role as a front-man for the true author) was due to his money-lending activities, trading in theatrical properties such as costumes and old plays, and possibly as an actor of no great talent. All evidence for his literary career was created as part of the plan to shield the true author's identity.

Contemporary allusions to Shakespeare • Anti-Stratfordians reject the surface meanings of Elizabethan and Jacobean references to Shakespeare as a playwright and instead look for ambiguities and encrypted meanings. They identify him with such literary characters as the laughingstock Sogliardo in Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour, the literary thief poet-ape in Jonson's poem of the same name, and the foolish poetry-lover Gullio in the university play The Return from Parnassus. Such characters are taken as evidence that the London theatrical world knew Shakespeare was a mere front for an unnamed author whose identity could not be explicitly broached.

Shakespeare's death

Last Will and Testament • The language of Shakespeare's will is mundane and unpoetic, makes no mention of personal papers or books of any kind, no mention of the disposal of any poems or of the 18 plays that remained unpublished at the time of his death, nor any reference to shares in the new Globe Theatre. The only theatrical reference in the will, monetary gifts to fellow actors to buy mourning rings, were interlined after the will had been written, casting suspicion on the authenticity of the bequest.

The effigy of Shakespeare’s Stratford monument as it appears today (left) and as it was portrayed in 1656.

Public notice at death • No records exist of Shakespeare being publicly mourned after he died, and no eulogies or poems commemorating the event were published until seven years later, as part of the prefatory matter in the First Folio collection of his plays. Oxfordians believe that the true playwright had died by 1609, the year Shake-speare's Sonnets appeared with a dedication written by Thomas Thorpe referring to "our ever-living Poet", an epithet that commonly eulogized a deceased warrior or poet as being immortalised in memory though his deeds.

Shakespeare's Stratford Monument • Shakespeare's funerary monument in Stratford consists of an effigy of him with pen in hand and an attached plaque praising his abilities as a writer. The earliest printed image of the effigy, in Sir William Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), differs greatly from its present appearance, and some anti-Stratfordians assert that the figure originally portrayed a man clutching a grain sack or a wool sack that was later altered as part of the plan to hide the identity of the true author. Richard Kennedy proposes that the monument was originally built to honour John Shakespeare, William’s father, said by tradition to have been a "considerable dealer in wool".

The evidence for Shakespeare's authorship

Main article: William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's father was granted a coat of arms in 1596, which in 1602 was contested by Ralph Brooke, who identified Shakespeare as a player in his complaint.

The mainstream view, to which nearly all academic Shakespeareans subscribe, is that the author referred to as "Shakespeare" was the same William Shakespeare who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, travelled to London and became an actor and sharer (part-owner) of the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men) acting company that owned the Globe Theatre, the Blackfriars Theatre, and exclusive rights to produce Shakespeare's plays from 1594 to 1642, and who was allowed the use of the honorific "gentleman" after 1596 when his father, John Shakespeare, was granted a coat of arms, and who died in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616.

Shakespeare scholars see no reason to suspect that the name was a pseudonym or that the actor was a front man for some other writer, since the records of the time all identify him as the writer, other playwrights such as Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe came from similar backgrounds, and no contemporary expressed doubt about Shakespeare’s authorship. In contrast to the methods used by anti-Stratfordians, Shakespeare scholars employ the same methodology to attribute works to the poet and playwright William Shakespeare as they use for other writers of the period: the historical record and stylistic studies, and maintain that the methods used by many anti-Stratfordians to identify alternative candidates—such as reading the work as autobiography, finding coded messages and cryptograms embedded in the works, and concocting conspiracy theories to explain the lack of evidence for any writer but Shakespeare—are unreliable, unscholarly, and explain why more than 70 candidates have been nominated as the "true" author. They say that the idea that Shakespeare revealed himself in his work is a Romantic notion of the 18th and 19th centuries applied anachronistically to Elizabethan and Jacobean writers.

Historical evidence for Shakespeare's authorship

The historical record is unequivocal in assigning the authorship of the Shakespeare canon to William Shakespeare. In addition to his name appearing on the title pages of these poems and plays during William Shakespeare of Stratford's lifetime, his name was given as that of a well-known writer at least 23 times. Several contemporaries corroborate the identity of the playwright as the actor, and explicit contemporary documentary evidence attests that the actor was the Stratford citizen.

Francis Meres • In 1598 Francis Meres named Shakespeare as a playwright and poet in his Palladis Tamia, referring to him as one of the authors by whom the "English tongue is mightily enriched". He names a dozen plays written by Shakespeare, including four which were never published in quarto: [Two] Gentlemen of Verona, [Comedy of] Errors, Love Labours Wonne, and King John, as well as ascribing to Shakespeare some of the plays that were published anonymously before 1598 – Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry IV. Meres mentions Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as being a writer of comedy in the same paragraph as he does Shakespeare. He refers to Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends" 11 years before the publication of the Sonnets.

Social status • In the rigid social structure of Elizabethan England, the Stratford-born actor William Shakespeare was entitled to append the honorific "gentleman" after his name by right of his father being granted a coat of arms in 1596, an honorific conventionally designated by the title "Master" or its abbreviations "Mr." or "M." prefixed to the name. This title was included in many contemporary references to Shakespeare during his lifetime, including official and literary records, and conclusively identifies William Shakespeare of Stratford as the "William Shakespeare" referred to as the author.

Shakespeare's honorific "Master" abbreviated as "M" on King Lear Q1 (1608).

• Stationers's entry, 23 August 1600: "Andrew Wise William Aspley. Entred for their copies vnder the handes of the wardens Two bookes, the one call Muche a Doo about nothinge Thother the second parte of the history of Kinge Henry the iiijth with the humours of Sir John Falstaff: Wrytten by master Shakespere.xij d."

• Stationers's entry, 26 November 1607: "Nathanial Butter John Busby. Entred for their Copie under thandes of Sir George Buck knight and Thwardens A booke called. Master William Shakespeare his historye of Kinge Lear, as yt was played before the Kinges maiestie at Whitehall vppon Sainct Stephens night at Christmas Last, by his maiesties servantes playinge vsually at the Globe on the Banksyde vj d."

• Title page of King Lear Q1 (1608): "M. William Shak-speare: HIS True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters."

• Epigram 159 by John Davies of Hereford in his The Scourge of Folly (1610): "To our English Terence, Mr. Will. Shake-speare."

• Epigram 92 by Thomas Freeman in his Runne and A Great Caste (1614): "To Master W: Shakespeare."

• List of "Our moderne, and present excellent Poets" in John Stow's Annales edited by Edmund Howes (1615): "M. Willi. Shakespeare gentleman".

• Ben Jonson explicitly identifies William Shakespeare, Gentleman, as the author in the title of his eulogy, "To the memory of my beloued, The AVTHOR Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left vs", published in the First Folio (1623).

• Other poets follow Jonson in identifying Shakespeare the gentleman as the author in the titles to their eulogies published in the First Folio: Vpon the Lines and Life of the Famous Scenicke Poet, Master William shakespeare (Hugh Holland); and TO THE MEMORIE of the deceased Authour Maister W. Shakespeare. (Leonard Digges).

Personal testimony by contemporaries

Both explicit personal testimony by his contemporaries and strong circumstantial evidence of personal relationships with contemporaries who interacted with him as an actor and playwright support Shakespeare's authorship.

Ben Jonson comments on Shakespeare in his private notes published in Timber or Discoveries (1641). (Combined images of bottom page 97 and top page 98.)

Ben Jonson • Playwright and poet Ben Jonson knew Shakespeare from at least 1598, when the Lord Chamberlain's Men performed his play Every Man in his Humour at the Curtain Theatre with Shakespeare as a cast member. During his 1618-1619 walking tour of England and Scotland (four years before the First Folio publication), Jonson spent two weeks as a guest of the Scottish poet William Drummond, who recorded Jonson's often contentious comments about contemporaries, including Shakespeare, whom he criticised as wanting (i.e., lacking) "arte" and for mistakenly giving Bohemia a coast in The Winter's Tale.

In 1614, six years after Jonson's death, his private notes written during his later life were published in which he judged Shakespeare in a comment that he specifically states is intended for posterity (Timber or Discoveries). Although in his First Folio eulogy Jonson had lauded Shakespeare's painstaking poetic artistry, in Timber he criticises Shakespeare's more casual approach to play writing. He praises Shakespeare as a person, writing "I lov'd the man, and doe honour his memory (on this side Idolatry) as much as any. Hee was (indeed) honest, and of an open, and free nature: had an excellent Phantsie, brave notions, and gentle expressions . . . . hee redeemed his vices, with his vertues. There was ever more in him to be praysed, then to be pardoned."

Heminges and Condell • Shakespeare's surviving fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell knew and worked with Shakespeare for more than 20 years. In the 1623 First Folio, they professed that they had published the Folio "onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow aliue, as was our Shakespeare, by humble offer of his playes".

George Buc • Historian, antiquary, and book collector Sir George Buc served as Deputy Master of the Revels from 1603 and as Master of the Revels from 1610 to 1622. His duties were to supervise and censor plays for the public theatres, arrange court play performances, and after 1606 license plays for publication. Buc noted on the title page of George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (1599), an anonymous play, that he had consulted Shakespeare on its authorship. Buc was meticulous in his efforts to attribute books and plays to the correct author, and in 1607 he personally licensed King Lear for publication as written by “Master William Shakespeare”.

William Camden defended Shakespeare’s right to bear arms about the same time he listed him as one of the great poets of his time.

William Camden • In 1602, Ralph Brooke, the York Herald, accused Sir William Dethick, the Garter King of Arms, of elevating 23 unworthy persons to the gentry, number four of whom was Shakespeare’s father, who had applied for arms 34 years earlier but had to wait for the success of his son before they were granted sometime before 1599. Brooke included a sketch of the Shakespeare arms, captioned "Shakespear ye Player by Garter." The grants, including John Shakespeare's, were defended by Dethick and Clarenceux King of Arms William Camden, the foremost antiquary of the time and life-long friend of Ben Jonson. In his Remaines Concerning Britaine, published in 1605 but completed two years earlier, Camden names Shakespeare the poet as one of the "most pregnant witts of these ages our times, whom succeeding ages may justly admire."

George Wilkins • Inn-keeper and part-time dramatist and pamphleteer George Wilkins collaborated with Shakespeare in writing Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with Wilkins writing the first half and Shakespeare the second. Both Wilkins and Shakespeare were witnesses in the case of Bellott v. Mountjoy, a 1612 marriage lawsuit concerning an incident involving the daughter of Shakespeare's landlord in London seven years earlier.

Recognition by other playwrights and writers

In addition to Ben Jonson, other playwrights, including those who sold plays to Shakespeare's company, wrote about Shakespeare as a person and a playwright.

University playwrights • Two of the three Parnassus plays produced at St John's College, Cambridge near the turn of the 17th century mention Shakespeare as an actor, poet, and playwright without a university education. In The First Part of the Return from Parnassus, two separate characters refers to Shakespeare as "Sweet Mr. Shakespeare", and in The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus (1606), the anonymous playwright has the actor Kempe say to the actor Burbage, "Few of the university men pen plays well . . . . Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down."

The two states of the title page of The Passionate Pilgrim (3rd ed., 1612)

Thomas Heywood • Prominent English actor, playwright, and author Thomas Heywood. An edition of The Passionate Pilgrim expanded with an additional nine poems written by Thomas Heywood with Shakespeare’s name on the title-page was published by William Jaggard in 1612. Heywood protested this piracy in his Apology for Actors (1612), adding that the author was "much offended with M. Jaggard (that altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name." That Heywood stated with certainty that the author was unaware of the deception, and that Jaggard removed Shakespeare’s name from unsold copies even though Heywood didn't explicitly name him, indicates that Shakespeare was the offended author. Elsewhere, in his poem "Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels" (1634) Heywood affectionately notes the nicknames his fellow playwrights had been known by. Of Shakespeare, he writes:

Our moderne Poets to that passe are driuen,

Those names are curtal'd which they first had giuen;

And, as we wisht to haue their memories drown'd,

We scarcely can afford them halfe their sound. . . .

Mellifluous Shake-speare, whose inchanting Quill

Commanded Mirth or Passion, was but Will.

John Webster • Playwright John Webster, in his dedication to White Divel (1612), wrote, "And lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right happy and copious industry of M. Shake-Speare, M. Decker, & M. Heywood, wishing what I write might be read in their light," here using the abbreviation "M." to denote the title "Master" that William Shakespeare of Stratford was entitled to use by virtue of being a titled gentleman.

Francis Beaumont • In a verse poem to Ben Jonson that has been dated to about 1608, poet and playwright Francis Beaumont alludes to several playwrights, including Shakespeare, about whom he wrote,

"Heere I would let slippe

(If I had any in mee) schollershippe,

And from all Learninge keepe these lines as cleere

as Shakespeares best are, which our heires shall heare

Preachers apte to their auditors to showe

how farr sometimes a mortall man may goe

by the dimme light of Nature".

Death of Shakespeare

The inscription on Shakespeare’s monument.

Shakespeare's Stratford monument • A monument to Shakespeare was erected in Holy Trinity Church, his local parish church in Stratford, sometime before 1623, that bears a plaque with an inscription identifying him as a writer. The first two Latin lines translate to "In judgment a Pylius (Nestor), in genius a Socrates, in art a Maro (Virgil), the earth covers him, the people mourn him, Olympus possesses him." The monument was not only specifically referred to in the First Folio, but other early 17th-century records identify it as being a memorial to Shakespeare and transcribe the inscription. Sir William Dugdale also included the inscription and identified the monument as commemorating the poet William Shakespeare in his Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), but the engraving was done from a sketch made in 1634 and its inaccuracy is similar to other inaccurate monument portrayals in his work.

Will bequests • The will of Shakespeare’s fellow actor, Augustine Phillips, executed 5 May 1605, proved 16 May 1605, bequeaths "to my Fellowe William Shakespeare a thirty shillings peece in gould, To my Fellowe Henry Condell one other thirty shillinge peece in gould . . .” William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon’s will, executed 25 March 1616, bequeaths "to my ffellowes John Hemynge Richard Burbage & Henry Cundell xxvj s viij d A peece to buy them Ringes." Numerous public records, including the royal patent of 19 May 1603 that chartered the King's Men, establishes that Philips, Heminges, Burbage, and Condell were fellow actors in the King's Men with William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's will also includes monetary bequests to buy mourning rings for his fellow actors and theatrical entrepreneurs Heminges, Burbage and Condell, two of whom later edited his collected plays. Anti-Stratfordians often try to cast suspicion on the bequests, which were interlined, saying that they were added later as part of the conspiracy, but the will was proved in the Prerogative Court of the Archbishop of Canterbury in London on 22 June 1616, and the original will was copied into the court register with the interlineations intact.

Eulogies • John Taylor was the first poet to mention in print the deaths of Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont in his 1620 poem "The Praise of Hemp-seed". Both had died within two months of each other four years earlier.

Ben Jonson wrote a short poem "To the Reader" commending the First Folio Droeshout engraving of Shakespeare as a good likeness. Included in the prefatory commendatory verses was Jonson's lengthy eulogy "To the memory of my beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us" in which he identifies Shakespeare as a playwright, a poet, and an actor, and writes:

Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were

To see thee in our waters yet appeare,

And make those flights upon the bankes of Thames,

That so did take Eliza, and our James!

Here Jonson not only links the author to Shakespeare's home territory of Stratford-upon-Avon, but has him appearing at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I.

Leonard Digges wrote the elegy "To the Memorie of the deceased Authour Maister W. Shakespeare" that was published in the Folio, in which he refers to "thy Stratford Moniment." Digges was raised in a village on the outskirts of Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1590s by his stepfather, William Shakespeare's friend Thomas Russell, who was appointed in Shakespeare's will as overseer to the executors.

William Basse wrote an elegy entitled "On Mr. Wm. Shakespeare" some time between 1616 and 1623, in which he suggests that Shakespeare should have been buried in Westminster Abbey next to Chaucer, Beaumont, and Spenser. This poem circulated very widely in manuscript and survives today in more than two dozen contemporary copies, several with the full title "On Mr. William Shakespeare, he died in April 1616," unambiguously referring to the Shakespeare of Stratford. Ben Jonson's eulogy responds directly to it, so it was certainly in existence before the publication of the First Folio in 1623.

Evidence for Shakespeare's authorship from his works

Shakespeare's are the most-studied secular works in history. Both textual and stylistic studies indicate that the author is compatible with the known biography of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon.

Education evident in the plays • No contemporary of Shakespeare ever referred to him as a learned writer or scholar. In fact, Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont both refer to his lack of classical learning. If a deeply erudite, university-trained playwright wrote the plays, it is hard to explain the many simple classical blunders in Shakespeare. Not only does he mistake the scansion of many classical names, in Troilus and Cressida he has Greeks and Trojans citing Plato and Aristotle a thousand years before their births, and in The Winter’s Tale, he gives "Delphos" for Delphi and confuses it with Delos, errors no scholar would make. Later critics such as Samuel Johnson remarked that Shakespeare's genius lay not in his erudition, but from his "vigilance of observation and accuracy of distinction which books and precepts cannot confer; from this almost all original and native excellence proceeds."

The King Edward VI grammar School at Stratford-upon-Avon was in the Guildhall about a half-mile from Shakespeare's birthplace in Henley Street.

Shakespeare’s plays differ from those of the university wits—Greene, Nash, Marlowe, Lily, Lodge, and Peele—in that they are not larded with ostentatious displays of the writer’s learning to show mastery of Latin or of classical principles of drama, with the exceptions of co-authored plays such as the Henry VI series and Titus Andronicus. Instead, his classical allusions rely on the the Elizabethan grammar school curriculum, which provided a rigorous regimen of Latin instruction from the age of 7 until the age of 14. The Latin curriculum began with William Lily’s Latin grammar Rudimenta Grammatices, which was by law the sole Latin grammar to be used in grammar schools, and progressed to Caesar, Livy, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca, all of which are quoted and echoed in the Shakespearean canon. Almost alone among his contemporary peers, Shakespeare’s plays are full of phrases from grammar school texts and pedagogy, including caricatures of school masters. Lily's Grammar is referred to in the plays by characters such as Demetrius and Chiron in Titus Andronicus (4.10), Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew, the schoolmaster Holofernes of Love's Labour's Lost (5.1) in a parody of a grammar-school lesson, Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, and Sir Hugh Evans, another schoolmaster who in Merry Wives of Windsor (4.1) gives the boy William a lesson in Latin, parodying Lily. Shakespeare alluded not only to grammar school but also to the petty school that children attended from the age of 5 to 7 to learn to read, a prerequisite for grammar school.

Claremont Shakespeare Clinic • Beginning in 1987, Ward Elliott, who was sympathetic to Oxford as the author, and Robert J. Valenza supervised a continuing study of Shakespeare’s works based on a quantitative comparison of Shakespeare’s stylistic habits (known as stylometrics) using computer programs to compare them to the works of 37 authors who had been claimed to be the true author at one time or another. The study, known as the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic, was last held in the spring of 2010.

The tests revealed that Shakespeare’s work shows consistent, countable, profile-fitting patterns, suggesting that he was a single individual, not a committee, and that he used more hyphens, feminine endings, and open lines and fewer relative clauses than most of the writers with whom he was compared. The result determined that none of the other tested claimants’ work could have been written by Shakespeare, nor could Shakespeare have been written by them, eliminating all of the claimants—including Oxford, Bacon, and Marlowe—as the true authors of the Shakespeare works.

Style • Much like today, literary styles went in and out of fashion, and Shakespeare was no exception. His late plays, such as The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Henry VIII, are written in a radically different style from the Elizabethan-eras plays, a style used by many other Jacobean playwrights. In addition, after the the King's Men began using the Blackfriars Theatre, for performances in 1609, Shakespeare's late plays were written to accommodate playing on a smaller stage, with more music, dancing, and more evenly divided acts to allow for trimming the candles used for stage lighting.

Title page of the 1634 quarto of The Two Noble Kinsmen by John Fletcher and Shakespeare.

Chronology of Shakespeare's plays • Studies show that an artist's creativity is responsive to the milieu in which the artist works, and especially to conspicuous political events. Dean Keith Simonton, a researcher into the factors of musical and literary creativity, especially Shakespeare’s, has conducted several studies concluding "beyond a shadow of a doubt" that the traditional play chronology is roughly in the correct order, and that Shakespeare's works exhibit stylistic development over the course of his career, just as is found for other artistic geniuses. Simonton's study, published in 2004, examined the correlation between the thematic content of Shakespeare’s plays and the political context in which they would have been written according to traditional and Oxfordian datings. When lagged two years, the Stratfordian chronologies yielded substantially meaningful associations between thematic and political context, while the Oxfordian chronologies yielded no relationships, no matter how they were lagged. Simonton, who declared his Oxfordian sympathies in the article and had expected the results to support Oxford’s authorship, concluded that "that expectation was proven wrong."

Collaborations with other playwrights • Shakespeare co-authored half of his last 10 plays, collaborating closely with other writers for the stage. Some anti-Stratfordian supporters of other candidates, particularly Oxfordians, say that those plays were finished by other playwrights after the death of the true author. But textual evidence from the late plays indicate that Shakespeare's collaborators were not always aware of what Shakespeare had done in a previous scene, and that they were following a rough outline rather than working from an unfinished script left by a long-dead playwright. For example, in Two Noble Kinsmen (1612-1613), written with John Fletcher, Shakespeare haves two characters meet and leaves them on stage at the end of one scene, yet Fletcher has them act as if they were meeting for the first time in the following scene.

History of the authorship question

Shakespeare's singularity and bardology

Main article: Shakespeare's reputation

Until the late 18th century, Shakespeare was not referred to as the greatest writer of all time, except in adulatory tributes attached to his works that were commonly used to eulogise poets. His reputation was that of a good and widely-known playwright and poet, and he was typically mentioned in the context of other contemporary poets and playwrights. In fact, until the actor David Garrick mounted the Shakespeare Stratford Jubilee in 1769, his and Ben Jonson's plays vied for second place in popularity to those of Beaumont and Fletcher, who were phenomenally popular after the theatres reopened in 1660 and whose critical reception was much higher than either.

During his lifetime and for roughly two centuries after his death, no one seriously suggested that anyone other than Shakespeare wrote the works, save for a handful of minor 18th century satirical and allegorical references. The emergence of the Shakespeare authorship question had to wait until he was regarded as the English national poet in a class by himself.

Precursors of doubt

Beginning in the 18th century, Shakespeare was regarded as both a transcendent genius and an untutored rustic. By the beginning of the 19th century, adulation of Shakespeare in the form of bardolatry was in full swing, and uneasiness began to emerge over the dissonance between Shakespeare's godlike reputation and the humdrum facts of his biography. Around 1845 Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed the underlying question in the air about Shakespeare by admitting he could not reconcile Shakespeare's verse with the image of a jovial actor and theatre manager. The rise of historical criticism, which had begun to challenge the authorial unity of Homer's epics and the historicity of the Bible, also fueled the emerging puzzlement over Shakespeare's authorship, in one critic's view becoming, "an accident waiting to happen," particularly after the shock on public opinion of David Strauss's historical investigation of Jesus.

Authorship question annals

While the movement originally relied on published arguments, after decades of failing to convince academics, in the late 19th century alternative authorship proponents turned to public debates and mock trials to gain public attention, a strategy that continues today. During the late 20th century, anti-Stratfordians increasingly availed themselves of popular media coverage on television and on the Internet to promote their theories, with some notable success.

No single listing can encompass all the articles and books that have been published espousing alternative authors for Shakespeare's works. The following is a list of those publications and events that were pivotal to the anti-Stratfordian movement or have attracted the most attention.

1845 American lecturer and writer Delia Bacon begins to research intensively a theory she was developing about the authorship of Shakespeare's works. She maps out a theory by October that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by a coterie of men, including Sir Walter Raleigh as the main writer with Edmund Spenser, under the leadership of Francis Bacon, for the purpose of inculcating an advanced political and philosophical system for which they themselves could not publicly assume the responsibility.

1848 Colonel Joseph C.Hart openly challenges the traditional attribution in his The Romance of Yachting, asserting that Shakespeare was a mere factotum vulgarizing the products of other men's genius, though he did not identify an alternative author.

1852 An essay written by Dr. Robert W. Jameson and published anonymously, "Who Wrote Shakespeare", appearing in the August 7 Chambers's Edinburgh Journal suggests that Shakespeare owned the playscripts, but had employed an unknown poor poet to write them.

1853 In 1853, with help from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Delia Bacon travels to Britain to research her theory, which she discusses with British scholars and writers.

1856 In January Delia Bacon publishes an anonymous article in Putnam's Monthly, "William Shakspeare and His Plays; An Enquiry Concerning Them", stating that Shakespeare of Stratford was not capable of writing the plays, and that they expressed the ideas of an unspecified great thinker. In England, disdaining archival research, she seeks instead to unearth buried manuscripts she believed would validate her theories. She tries to persuade the caretaker to open Bacon's tomb at St Albans, and at Stratford she breaks down after summoning her courage for hours and testing her strength to prise open the stones by Shakespeare's monument.

1856 In September, William Henry Smith, publishes a letter to the president of the British Shakespeare Society as a pamphlet, Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakspeare's Plays? A Letter to Lord Ellesmere.

1857 In January, Smith's pamphlet is republished in Boston in The Panorama of Life and Literature. Later that year he enlarges the article into a short book, Bacon and Shakespeare: An Inquiry Touching Players, Play-Houses and Play-Writers in the Days of Elizabeth, in which he states in the preface to have been unaware of Delia Bacon's ideas and to have held his opinion for nearly 20 years.

1857 With the help of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Delia Bacon publishes her book The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded.

1885 The English Bacon Society comes into being, to advance the idea that Bacon authored Shakespeare's plays.

1888 Former Republican congressman Ignatius Donnelly publishes The Great Cryptogram in which he claims to have discovered "mystic ciphers" in Shakespeare's plays proving they had been written by Francis Bacon.

1892-93 A 15-month debate is conducted in the Boston monthly The Arena, with Donnelly as one of the plaintiffs, F.J.Furnivall on the defence, and a 25-member jury including Henry George, Edmund Gosse, and Henry Irving. The verdict heavily favours William Shakespeare of Stratford.

Owen's cipher wheel he used to decrypt Francis Bacon's hidden ciphers.

1893 After reading Donnelly, Dr. Orville Ward Owen begins publishing the multi-volume Sir Francis Bacon's Cipher Story, in which he deciphers Bacon's biography from his writings and the works of Shakespeare, in the process discovering that Francis Bacon was the secret son of Queen Elizabeth. Owen constructed a "cipher wheel", a 1,000-foot long strip of canvas on which he had pasted the works of Shakespeare and other writers and mounted on two parallel wheels so he could quickly collate pages with key words as he turned them for decryption.

1895 Attorney Wilbur Gleason Zeigler publishes the novel Was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries, in which he sets out in the preface for the first time the theory that Marlowe survived his 1593 death and wrote Shakespeare's plays.

1907 The German literary critic Karl Bleibtreu advances the nomination of the 5th Earl of Rutland, Roger Manners.

1907 Orville Ward Owen decodes detailed instructions revealing the site where a box containing Bacon's literary treasures and proof of his authorship had been buried in the Wye river by Chepstow Castle on the Duke of Beaufort's property. His expensively rented dredging machinery fails to retrieve the concealed manuscripts. Owen's former assistant, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, also sails to England after decoding a different message using a bilateral cipher, which reveals that Bacon's secret manuscripts were hidden behind some panels in Canonbury Tower, Islington.

1908 British barrister Sir George Greenwood publishes The Shakespeare Problem Restated, which sought to disqualify William Shakespeare from the authorship but withheld support for any alternative authors, therefore sanctioning the search for other alternate authors besides Bacon and setting the stage for the rise of other candidates such as Marlowe, Stanley, Manners, and Oxford.

1909 Mark Twain publishes Is Shakespeare Dead?, in which he reveals his anti-Stratfordian beliefs and leans toward Bacon as the true author.

1913 John M. Robertson publishes The Baconian Heresy: A Confutation, a refutation of the Baconian theory that Shakespeare had expert legal knowledge by demonstrating that legalisms pervaded Elizabethan and Jacobean literature.

1916 A Cook Country Circuit Court judge, Richard Tuthill, finds against Shakespeare and positively determines that Francis Bacon was the author of the works. Damages of $5,000 are awarded the Baconian advocate, Colonel George Fabyan. In the ensuing uproar, Tuthill rescinds his decision, and another judge dismisses Fabyan's suit.

1918 Professor Abel Lefranc, a renowned authority on French and English literature, revives William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby as the author, based on biographical evidence found in the plays and poems.

1920 An English school-teacher, John Thomas Looney, publishes Shakespeare Identified, identifying Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford as the true author. Looney believed that Oxford's published verse resembles Shakespeare's so closely that it proves common authorship, and that several of Shakespeare's characters were autobiographical. Looney also thought Shakespeare's plays were de Vere's model for a return to feudal values under an authoritarian aristocracy.

1922 Looney and Greenwood found The Shakespeare Fellowship, an international organization to promote discussion and debate on the authorship question.

N. R. Clark’s rendition of the dial used by Francis Bacon to embed ciphers in the First Folio

1923 Archie Webster publishes "Was Marlowe the Man?" in The National Review claiming that Marlowe wrote the works of Shakespeare and that the Sonnets were an autobiographical account of his survival and banishment.

1932 Allardyce Nicoll publishes the discovery of a manuscript that appears to establish that James Wilmot was the earliest proponent of Baconian theory. The manuscript, "Some reflections on the life of William Shakespeare", was found among papers donated to London University in 1929 by the widow of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence (1837–1914), a leading supporter of Bacon's candidacy. Ostensibly a report to the "Ipswich Philosophic Society" in 1805 by one James Corton Crowell, it narrates Wilmot's supposed unsuccessful search for records relating to Shakespeare in Stratford on Avon and the surrounding area in 1780, which led him to conclude that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare's works. The authenticity of the manuscript was accepted after Nicholl’s publication, but in 2003 John Rollett and Daniel Wright could find no records for Cowell or the Ipswich Philosophic Society at that date and Wright suggested that the manuscript might have been forged. In 2010 James Shapiro demonstrated that some details in the manuscript were not discovered until the 1840s and that it followed a paper published by Sidney Lee in 1880, proving the document a forgery.

1934 Percy Allen announces his discovery that Oxford and Elizabeth were lovers and that the actor Shakespeare was their son in his Anne Cecil, Elizabeth, and Oxford.

1938 Roderick Eagle opens Edmund Spenser's tomb to find a poem that he deduces was thrown into the grave that proves Bacon was Shakespeare, but he finds only bones and an old skull.

Some Oxfordians think the Ashbourne portrait is a painting of de Vere overpainted as a portrait of Shakespeare.

1940 Charles Wisner Barrell commissions X-rays of the Ashbourne portrait to uncover evidence that the work was originally of Edward de Vere and later tampered with to form a Shakespeare portrait, which he believes supports de Vere as the true Shakespeare.

1943 Writer Alden Brooks revealed that Sir Edward Dyer, who died in 1607, was the true bard in Will Shakspere and the Dyer's hand. Brooks had earlier argued that Shakespeare was a playbroker, a view that was later adopted by other anti-Stratfordians.

1947 Percy Allen reveals his conversations with Oxford, Bacon, and Shakespeare through the use of the medium Hester Dowden in his Talks with Elizabethans Revealing the Mystery of "William Shakespeare", with the verdict that Oxford was the main writer with the other two merely touching up.

1952 Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn Sr publish their 1,300-page This Star of England, which is regarded as a classic Oxfordian text. They uncover the Elizabethan state secret that the "fair youth" of the sonnets was Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, the product of a passionate love affair between Oxford and the Queen, and that the "Shakespeare" plays were written by Oxford to memorialise their love affair. The Ogburns find many parallels between Oxford's life and the works, claiming that the "play Hamlet is straight biography." This becomes known as the "Prince Tudor theory".

1955 Broadway press agent Calvin Hoffman revives the Marlovian theory with the publication of The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare".

1955 American cryptologists William and Elizebeth Friedman win the Folger Shakespeare Library Literary Prize of $1000 for a definitive study that was condensed and published in 1957 as The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined, which disproves the claims that the works of Shakespeare contains hidden ciphers.

1956 Hoffman looks for documentary evidence buried in Sir Thomas Walsingham's tomb in St. Nicholas's Church, Chislehurst, Kent, but on opening the tomb finds only sand.

1957 The Shakespeare Oxford Society is founded in the U. S.

1958-1962 Four major works, by Frank Wadsworth, Reginald Churchill, N. H. Gibson, and George L. McMichael and Edgar M. Glenn respectively survey the histories of the anti-Stratfordian phenomenon from a critical orthodox perspective.

1959 The American Bar Association Journal publishes a series of articles and letters on the authorship controversy, later anthologised as Shakespeare Cross-Examination (1961).

1984 Charlton Ogburn, Jr. publishes The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Myth and the Reality, securing Oxford as the most popular theory and beginning the modern renaissance of the movement based on seeking publicity through moot court trials, media debates, television, and later the Internet, including Wikipedia.

1987 In the mid-1980s Charles Ogburn Jr. considered that academics were best challenged by recourse to law, and the Oxfordians had their day in court when three justices of the Supreme Court of the United States convened a moot court to hear the case on September 25, 1987. It was structured so that literary experts would not be represented. The justices determine that the case was based on a conspiracy theory, and that the reasons given by Oxfordians for this conspiracy were both incoherent and unpersuasive.

1988 A retrial was organised in the United Kingdom in the expectancy that the 1987 decision could be reversed. The moot court, presided over by three Lords, was held in London's Inner Temple on November 26, 1988, with Shakespeare scholars allowed to argue their case. The outcome confirmed the American verdict.

1989 PBS FRONTLINE broadcasts "The Shakespeare Mystery".

1991 The Atlantic Monthly publishes a print debate between Tom Bethell ("The Case for Oxford" and Irv Matus ("The Case for Shakespeare".

1994 British school teacher A. D. Wraight publishes The Story that the Sonnets Tell, in which she reveals that the story is that Christopher Marlowe is the true author.

1994 Oxfordians Marty Hyatt and Bill Boyle start the first Oxfordian Internet mailing list, "Evermore", which eventually becomes Nina Green's "Phaeton" listserv.

1994 On 27 December Hardy M. Cook bans authorship discussions from the Listserv SHAKSPER as being disruptive to academic discourse.

1995 The Usenet newsgroup humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare (HLAS) is started, which is soon taken over by authorship discussions.

1997 Oxfordian Mark Alexander establishes the Shakespeare Authorship Sourcebook, an online source for anti-Stratfordian and Oxfordian texts.

1999 Harper's Magazine publishes a print debate between anti-Stratfordians and Stratfordians, "The Ghost of Shakespeare".

2000 The Shakespeare Fellowship which had foundered in the 1950s, is revived in the U. S.

2001 Roger A. Stritmatter is awarded a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a dissertation on "The Marginalia of Edward de Vere's Geneva Bible", becoming the first such candidate awarded a graduate degree for a work that assumes the Oxfordian theory is true. The work is considered by many Oxfordians as the "smoking gun" that Looney predicted would eventually be found confirming Oxford's authorship.

2001 Paul Streitz publishes Oxford: Son of Queen Elizabeth I, which asserts that Oxford was not only was not only Queen Elizabeth's lover who sired Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, but her illegitimate son as well, which is known in Oxfordian circles as the "Prince Tudor Part II" theory.

2002 Mike Rubbo's documentary TV programme Much Ado About Something, brings the Marlowe theory of authorship to a much wider audience.

2002 After years of lobbying by the Marlowe Society, a memorial glass panel honouring Christopher Marlow featuring a question mark next to his date of death is installed in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner.

2003 An authorship symposium is conducted under the auspices of the Tennessee Law review.

2005 Writer Mark Anderson publishes "Shakespeare" by another name: the life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the man who was Shakespeare.

2007 The private Internet newsgroup The Forest of Arden is started by disaffected HLAS members to allow on-line discussion of the authorship question in a civil atmosphere. The group is made public, with only members allowed to post, in July 2008.

2007 On April 14 the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition issues an Internet signing petition, the "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt about the Identity of William Shakespeare", coinciding with Brunel University's announcement of a one-year Master of Arts programme in Shakespeare authorship studies. The coalition intends to enlist broad public support so that by 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, the academic Shakespeare establishment will be forced to acknowledge that legitimate grounds for doubting Shakespeare's authorship exist. More than 1,200 people signed the petition by the end of 2007. By October 2010, 1,846 had signed the petition, 330 of them academics.

2007 The New York Times publishes a survey of 265 Shakespeare professors on the Shakespeare authorship question. To the question whether there is good reason to question Shakespeare's authorship, 6% answered "yes", and 11% "possibly". When asked their opinion of the topic, 61% chose "A theory without convincing evidence" and 32% "A waste of time and classroom distraction".

File:Contester Will dj.JPG

James Shapiro explores the social origins of the controversy in Contested Will (2010).

2009 Filmmaker Roland Emmerich announces his next film will be about Oxford-as-Shakespeare based on a script he bought eight years earlier. The film, Anonymous, starring Rhys Ifans and Vanessa Redgrave, will be released in the United States 23 September 2011. It portrays Oxford as the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth who became the queen's lover as an adult, with whom he sires his own half-brother/son, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, to whom he dedicates the Sonnets.

2010 Charles Beauclerk, Earl of Burford, a descendant of Edward de Vere, publishes Shakespeare's Lost Kingdom: The True History of Shakespeare and Elizabeth, in which he espouses the "Prince Tudor Part II" theory.

2010 Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro takes on the authorship question in Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, in which he criticises academe for ignoring the topic and effectively surrendering the field to anti-Stratfordians.

Alternative candidates

Although they overlap, the types of evidence marshaled to support the various alternative candidates fall into three main categories: parallel passages, biographical allusions extracted from the works, and hidden messages found by means of ciphers, cryptograms, or codes.

Sir Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Sir Francis Bacon

Main article: Baconian theory

The leading candidate of the 19th century was one of the great intellectual figures of Jacobean England, Sir Francis Bacon, lawyer, philosopher, essayist and scientist. The case for Bacon relies upon historical and literary conjectures and cryptographical revelations found in the works that disclose his authorship.

Historical • In a letter addressed to John Davies, Bacon closes "so desireing you to bee good to concealed poets", which his supporters take as Bacon referring to himself. Sir Toby Matthew, in a letter to Bacon (after 1621) wrote that: 'The most prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation and of this side of the sea is of your Lordship's name, though he be known by another.' They also point to Bacon's comment that play-acting was used by the ancients 'as a means of educating men's minds to virtue,' and argue that while he outlined both a scientific and moral philosophy in his Advancement of Learning (1605), only the first part was published under his name during his lifetime. His moral philosophy, it is argued, was concealed in the Shakespeare plays.

The great number of legal allusions used by Shakespeare demonstrate his expertise in the law, and Bacon not only became Queen's Counsel in 1596, but was appointed Attorney General in 1613.

Literary • After discovering hidden political meanings in the plays and parallels between those ideas and the known works of Francis Bacon, Delia Bacon originally proposed him as the leader of a group of disaffected philosopher-politicians who tried to promote republican ideas to counter the despotism of the Tudor-Stewart monarchies through the medium of the public stage. From Bacon’s letters, she deciphered instructions for locating a will and archives beneath Shakespeare’s gravestone that would prove the works were Bacon’s, but she failed to muster the courage to prise up the stone slab.

Later supporters of Bacon found similarities between a great number of specific phrases and aphorisms from the plays and those written down by Bacon in his wastebook, the Promus. Mrs Henry Pott edited Bacon's Promus, drawing parallels with Shakespeare, in 1883.

Cryptograms • Since Bacon was knowledgeable about ciphers, early Baconians suspected that he left his signature in the Shakespeare canon. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries Baconians discovered that the works were riddled with ciphers supporting Bacon as the true author.

In 1881, Mrs. C. F. Ashwood Windle, inspired by Delia Bacon's reference to a cipher, discovered carefully worked-out jingles in each play that revealed Bacon as the author. She in turn inspired other cryptologists, most notably Ignatius Donnelly, who also discovered probative cryptograms in the plays. He in turn inspired Dr. Orville Ward Owen, who deciphered Bacon's complete biography from the works as well as revealing that Francis Bacon was the secret son of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester. Baconian cryptogram hunting flourished well into the 20th century, and in 1905 Walt WHitman biographer Dr. Isaac Hull Platt discovered that the Latin word honorificabilitudinitatibus found in Love's Labour's Lost is an anagram of Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi ("These plays, the offspring of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world.").

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604)

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

Main article: Oxfordian theory

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain. He followed his grandfather and father in patronising a company of players, including a band of tumblers as well as companies of adult and boy actors. Although none of his theatrical works survive, De Vere was recognised as a playwright, one of the "best for comedy amongst us", by Francis Meres, as well as an important courtier poet.

The case for Oxford relies upon historical and literary conjectures, biographical coincidences, and cryptographical revelations found in the works that disclose his authorship. After being proposed in the 1920s, Oxford quickly overtook Bacon to become the most popular alternative candidate and remains so to this day.

Although Oxford had been nominated previously and was even a part of Bacon's authorship coterie, J. Thomas Looney was the first to lay out a comprehensive case for his authorship in 1920 that proved convincing to many Shakespeare skeptics. Instead of finding coded tutorials for republicanism in the plays à la Delia Bacon, Looney found allegories based on barely-disguised autobiography to promote the return to medieval values of social class and authoritarian monarchical rule.

They also note his long term relationships with Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Southampton, his knowledge of Court life, his extensive education, his cultural achievements, and his wide-ranging travels through France and Italy to what would later become the locations of many of Shakespeare's plays.

Oxford died in 1604 with 10 Shakespeare plays yet to be written according to the most widely accepted chronology. Oxfordians date the later plays earlier and say that all the contemporary allusions or later sources were added by other hands dring revision long after Oxford's death and were not published or performed until years later.

In one version of Oxfordianism, the Prince Tudor theory propounded by Percy Allen and developed by Charlton Greenwood Ogburn and his wife, de Vere was Queen Elizabeth's illegitimate son by her uncle Thomas Seymour. Edward de Vere then became his mother's paramour and fathered on her Henry Wriothesley, the putative 'Fair Youth' of Shakespeare's sonnets, with whom he had a homosexual relationship.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

Christopher Marlowe

Main article: Marlovian theory

The case for Marlowe relies upon historical and literary conjectures, biographical coincidences, and cryptographical revelations found in the works that disclose his authorship.

Although born only two months apart, Marlowe is recognized as the major contemporary influence on Shakespeare. Unlike most other major candidates, Marlowe, like Shakespeare, was of humble origins. A brilliant poet and dramatist who infused drama with blank verse of unprecedented beauty and power, Marlowe, along with Thomas Kyd, created a new form of tragedy for the stage. Had he not been killed at the age of 29, Marlovians say he is the only candidate who demonstrated the potential to reach the literary heights that Shakespeare was to reach.

However, Marlovians claim that he didn't really die in Deptford on 30 May 1593. Whether he went on to write the works of Shakespeare or not, they argue that the most logical explanation of what happened that day was that the people were there — with the help of Thomas Walsingham and others — to fake Marlowe's death. They note that his biographers already disagree over why he was killed, even admitting that 'the legal details tell the 'whole story' about as well as a sieve holds molasses.' Most Marlovians propose that the body buried as his in an unmarked grave was probably that of John Penry. The purpose of this deception was, they argue, to allow Marlowe to escape arrest and almost certain execution on charges of subversive atheism.

A central plank in the Marlovian theory is that the very first work linked to the name William Shakespeare —Venus and Adonis— was registered with the Stationers' Company on 18 April 1593 with no named author, but was printed with William Shakespeare's name signed to the dedication, and on sale just 13 days after Marlowe's reported death. Marlovians use very few of the standard anti-Stratfordian arguments to support their theory, believing many of them to be misguided, misleading or unnecessary.

William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby (1561-1642)

William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby

The case for Derby relies upon historical and literary conjectures and biographical coincidences.

Born in 1561, Stanley's mother was Margaret Clifford, great granddaughter of Henry VII, whose family line made Stanley an heir to the throne. He married Elizabeth de Vere, daughter of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford and Anne Cecil. First proposed in 1891–1892 by James Greenstreet. One of the chief arguments in support of Derby's candidacy is a pair of 1599 letters by the Jesuit spy George Fenner in which it is reported that Derby is 'busy penning plays for the common players.' Abel Lefranc based his claims on similarities between characters and scenes in Shakespeare's life, and those in Derby's, citing his 1578 visit to the Court of Navarre as reflected in Love's Labour's Lost. His older brother, the 5th.earl, Ferdinando Stanley formed a group of players which evolved into the King's Men, one of the companies most associated with Shakespeare. E. A. J. Honigmann argued that the first production of A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed at William Stanley's wedding banquet.

Elizabeth de Vere's maternal grandfather was William Cecil, often theorized to be alluded to in the portrait of Polonius in Hamlet. In 1599, Stanley was reported as having financed one of London's two children's drama companies, the Paul's Boys and, his playing company, Derby's Men, known for playing at the 'Boar's Head' which played multiple times at court in 1600 and 1601. Derby was also closely associated with William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke and his brother Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery and later 4th Earl of Pembroke, the two dedicatees of the 1623 Shakespearean folio. Around 1628 to 1629, when Derby released his estates to his son James, who became the 7th Earl, the named trustees were Pembroke and Montgomery. Asserting a similarity with the name 'William Shakespeare', supporters of the Stanley candidacy note that Stanley's first name was William, his initials were W. S., and he was known to sign himself, 'Will'. Stanley is often mentioned as a leader or participant in the "group theory" of Shakespearean authorship.

Evidence arguing that plays or poems signed W.S. must refer to Stanley meet with the objection that these were very common initials in Elizabethan times, and might denote also Wentworth Smith, a dramatist, William Smith a poet, Sir William Segar, a man of letters, William Sly, one of Shakespeare's fellow-actors, or anyone of several others.

Full List of Candidates

Seventy-five full or partial Shakespeare Claimants

• Alexander, William (1568–1640), 1st Earl of Stirling
• Andrewes, Lancelot (1555-1626), Bishop of Winchester
• Bacon, Anthony (1558–1601)
• Bacon, Francis (1561–1626)
• Barnfield, Richard (1574–1620)
• Barnes, Barnabe (1571–1609)
• Bernard, Sir John (1605–1674)
• Blount, Charles (1563–1606), 8th Baron Mountjoy and 1st Earl of Devonshire
• Bodley, Sir Thomas (1545-1613)
• Bodley, Rev. Miles (ca. 1553- ca. 1611), proposed in 1940 (mistakenly as "Sir Miles Bodley") by W. M. Cunningham.
• Burbage, Richard (1567–1619)
• Burton, Robert (1577–1640)
• Butts, William (d. 1583) proposed by Walter Conrad Arensberg
• Campion, Edmund (1540–1581) proposed by Joanne Ambrose in 2005.
• Cecil, Robert (1563–1612), 1st Earl of Salisbury
• Chettle, Henry (1560–1607)
• Daniel, Samuel (1562–1619)
• de Vere, Edward (1550–1604), 17th Earl of Oxford
• Dekker, Thomas (1572–1632)
• Devereux, Walter (1541?–1576), 1st Earl of Essex
• Devereux, Robert (Essex) (1566–1601), 2nd Earl of Essex
• Donne, John (1572–1631), Dean of St Paul's Cathedral
• Drake, Sir Francis (1540-1596)
• Drayton, Michael (1563–1631)
• Dyer, Sir Edward (1543–1607) Proposed by Alden Brooks in 1943.
• Ferrers, Henry (1549–1633)
• Fletcher, John (1579–1625)
• Florio, John (1554–1625)
• Florio, Michelangelo Proposed by Santi Paladino in 1925
• Greene, Robert (1558–1592)
• Greville, Fulke (1554–1628) 1st Baron Brooke, proposed by A. W. L. Saunders in 2007
• Griffin, Bartholomew (d. 1602)
• Hastings, William. Proposed by Robert Nield in 2007.
• Herbert, William (1580-1630), 3rd Earl of Pembroke
• Heywood, Thomas (1574–1641)
• The Jesuits proposed by Harold Johnson in Did the Jesuits Write 'Shakespeare'?, 1916.
• Jonson, Ben (1572–1637)
• Kyd, Thomas (1558–1594)
• Lanier, Emilia (1569–1645), proposed by John Hudson in 2007.
• Lodge, Thomas (1557–1625)
• Lyly, John (1554–1606)
• Manners, Elizabeth Sidney (d. 1615), Countess of Rutland
• Manners, Roger (1576–1612), 5th Earl of Rutland
• Marlowe, Christopher (1564–1593)
• Mathew, Sir Tobie (157-1565
• Middleton, Thomas (1580–1627)
• More, Sir Thomas (1478-1535), Lord Chancellor of England and Saint of the Catholic Church
• Munday, Anthony (1560–1633)
• Nashe, Thomas (1567–1601)
• Neville, Henry proposed by Brenda James and William Rubenstein in 2005
• Nugent, William (1550 – 1625), first proposed by *Elizabeth Hickey in 1978.
• Paget, Henry (d. 1568)
• Peele, George (1556–1596)
• Pierce, William. Proposed by Peter Zenner in 1999.
• Porter, Henry (fl. c. 1596–99)
• Raleigh, Sir Walter (1554–1618)
• The Rosicrucians
• Sackville, Thomas (1536–1608), Lord Buckhurst, 1st Earl of Dorset
• Shirley, Sir Anthony (1565?–1635)
• Sidney Herbert, Mary (1561–1621), Countess of Pembroke
• Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–1586)
• Smith, Wentworth (1571 – c.1623)
• Spenser, Edmund (1552–1599), proposed in 1940 by W. M. Cunningham.
• Stanley William, 6th Earl of Derby (1561–1642)
• Stuart, James, King of England (1566–1625) proposed by Malcolm X in 1965.
• Stuart, Mary (1542–1587), Queen of Scots
• Tudor, Elizabeth (1533–1603), Queen of England, proposed anonymously in 1857, re-proposed by *W. R. Titterton in 1913 (not too seriously) and by G. E. Sweet in 1956
• Warner, William (c. 1558–1609)
• Thomas Watson (1555-1592)
• Webster, John (1580?–1625?)
• Whateley, Anne
• Wilson, Robert (1572–1600)
• Wolsey, Thomas (1473?–1530) Cardinal of England
• Wotton, Sir Henry (1568-1639), proposed in 1940 by W.M. Cunningham.
• Wriothesley, Henry (1573–1624), 3rd Earl of Southampton

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