Shakespeare authorship question

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The Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare surrounded by portraits of four contemporaries who have been advocated as the true author of his works. Clockwise from top left:Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby and Christopher Marlowe.

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 as the author.

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, from which rose the idea that the Shakespeare attribution was possibly a deception. Public debate and a prolific literature of the idea dates to the mid-19th century, and since then numerous figures from his time have been nominated as the true author, including Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe and William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby.

Although this idea has attracted a good deal of public attention, most Shakespeare scholars and literary historians dismiss the claims and consider it a fringe theory with no historical evidence, and for the most part they disregard the claims except to refute or disparage them. Nearly all academic scholars accept that William Shakespeare was the primary author of the canon, and all but a few of those who have investigated the various alternative authorship theories deny their validity.

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 say that biographical interpretations of literature are invalid 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 for any other author of the time. No such supporting evidence exists for any other candidate, and no one questioned Shakespeare’s authorship during his lifetime or for centuries after his death.

Despite these arguments, 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 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 some of them. . The appearance of Shakespeare's surviving signatures, which anti-Stratfordians have characterised as "scratchy" and "an illiterate scrawl", is taken by some 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. 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. He is identified 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 almost 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.

Title page of King Lear Q1 (1608) with Shakespeare's honorific "Master" abbreviated as "M".

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 life, including official and literary records, and conclusively identifies William Shakespeare of Stratford as the "William Shakespeare" referred to as the author.

• 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 Shake-speare, HIS True Chronicle History of the life and death of King Lear and his three daughters."
• Poem by John Davies of Hereford in his The Scourge of Folly (1610): "To our English Terence, Mr. Will. Shake-speare."
• Playwright John Webster in his dedication to White Divel (1612): "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."
• Poem 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".

Recognition by other playwrights and writers • 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."

Prominent English actor, playwright, and author Thomas Heywood

Poet and playwright Francis Beaumont

Collaborations with other playwrights • Shakespeare co-authored half of his last 10 plays, collaborating closely with other writers for the stage, and the attribution studies which reveal mixed authorship remain 'a nightmare' for proponents of a concealed aristocratic writer, since it is hard to imagine a courtier rubbing elbows as an equal with a string of lowly playwrights.

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 the deaths of Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont in print 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 court of 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 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.

Personal testimony by contemporaries

In addition to explicit personal testimony by his contemporaries, strong circumstantial evidence of personal relationships with contemporaries who interacted with him as an actor and playwright exists.

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 a 1618-1619 a 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 criticized as wanting (i.e., lacking) "arte" and for mistakenly giving Bohemia a coast in the Winter's Tale.

Six years after Jonson's death, Timber or Discoveries (1641) his private notes written from time to time during the later years of his life, were published, in which he commented on Shakespeare in a judgement that he specifically states is intended for posterity. Although in his First Folio eulogy he had praised Shakespeare painstaking efforts while writing his poetry, in Timber he criticizes Shakespeare's more casual approach to writing plays. He praises Shakespeare as a person, writing "I loved the man, and do honor his memory on this side idolatry as much as any. He was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions . . . . he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned."

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

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 an anonymous play, George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (1599), that he had consulted Shakespeare on the authorship of the play. 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.

Evidence for Shakespeare's authorship from the 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 rigourous 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 discovered 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.

Chronology of Shakespeare's plays • Artistic creativity has been found to be responsive to its environment, 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. In 2004 he published a study examining 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."

History of the authorship question

Shakespeare's singularity and bardology

Main article: Shakespeare's reputation

Except for eulogistic tributes attached to his works, during his lifetime and until the late 18th century Shakespeare was not regarded as the greatest writer of all time, and his reputation was that of a good and widely-known playwright and poet, and he was always typically equated with other contemporary poets and playwrights. during Shakespeare's lifetime and for roughly two centuries after his death, no one seriously suggested that anyone other than Shakespeare wrote the works. The emergence of the Shakespeare authorship question had to wait until he was regarded as the English national poet in a class by himself. and, by the beginning of the 19th century, adulation of Shakespeare, in the form of bardolatry, was in full swing. Yet desultory uneasiness about the difference between Shakespeare's godlike reputation and the humdrum facts of his biography began to emerge. In 1837 a character in Disraeli's novel Venetia queried Shakespeare's authorship. In the winter of 1845–6,Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed the underlying question in the air about Shakespeare in admitting he could not marry the fact Shakespeare was a jovial actor and manager to his verse. The rise of historical criticism, which had begun to challenge the authorial unity of Homer's epics and to the Bible, influenced the emerging scepticism, which was, in one critic's view, "an accident waiting to happen," particularly after the shock impact of the biblical critic David Strauss's work on public opinion.

Formal doubts

In 1848, a Colonel Joseph C.Hart openly challenged the traditional consensus, 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 a real alternative author. It was the American lecturer and writer Delia Bacon who took the crucial step of explaining why the plays should be reattributed to an alternative candidate.. She argued that Shakespeare's works were written by a Round Table of aristocratic ghostwriters to communicate the advanced political and philosophical ideas of their leader, Francis Bacon. With Ignatius Donnelly, the Baconian approach took a new turn by seeking to discover 'mystic ciphers'in Shakespeare's work. His approach stimulated a veritable 'army of scholars' to look for ciphers, with the result that occultism began to dominate Baconian activity from 1888 onwards. Popular education, and the rise of detective fiction contributed to the vogue, as sober literary history metamorphosed into a game of detection in which cultivated amateurs could challenge the professionals. By the early 20th century, the Baconian movement had begun to fade. Notable doubters such as Sir George Greenwood, whose legal arguments Mark Twain was soon to plagiarise without acknowledgement, retained their hostility to Shakespeare, while withholding support for an alternative candidacy. In 1913, John M. Robertson published a devastating deconstruction of Baconian theories that Shakespeare must have had detailed knowledge of the law. Interest in other possible candidates, such as Marlowe, Stanley, Manners and Oxford, began to arise, challenging the ascendency of Bacon. The German literary critic, Karl Bleibtreu, advanced the nomination of the 5th Earl of Rutland, Roger Manners in 1907.

The drama dial used by Francis Bacon to embed ciphers revealing his authorship in the First Folio, according to Natalie Rice Clark’s Bacon’s Dial in Shakespeare: A Compass-Clock Cipher (1922).

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

Attorney Wilbur Gleason Zeigler had in fact already argued for Marlowe's candidacy in the preface to a novel of his which was based upon this notion and published in 1895 but his idea resurfaced only in 1923, when Archie Webster wrote the first straight exposition in support of Marlovian theory, with particular attention to the Sonnets and poems. Of the more recent proponents of the theory, Calvin Hoffman in 1955 and A. D. Wraight in 1994 have probably had the most impact. Mike Rubbo's prize-winning 2002 TV programme Much Ado About Something also brought this theory to a much wider audience.

In 1920, an English school-teacher, John Thomas Looney, published Shakespeare Identified, identifying Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford as the putative author. His theory is anchored in a belief that Oxford's verse resembles Shakespeare's so closely, that the similarity proves a common authorship. If many advocates of Bacon's candidacy thought Shakespeare's works were written by an Elizabethan syndicate of nobles wedded to republican values and the overthrow of monarchical despotism, Looney to the contrary thought Shakespeare's plays, as written by de Vere, were an exemplary model for a return to feudal values under an authoritarian aristocracy.

Looney's theory gained many notable advocates, including Sigmund Freud. Alden Brooks, though theorizing the candidacy of Sir Edward Dyer (1943), developed a view in 1937 that was to prove influential later by arguing that Shakespeare was a playbroker. His thesis was taken up in America in the 1940s by Charles Wisner Barrell, and by Charlton Ogburn Sr, whose This Star of England (1952) was 'the most ambitious publishing venture in the annals of the controversy'. Ogburn's son Charlton Ogburn, Jr. revived the waning fortunes of the Oxfordian school with his The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Myth and the Reality(1984), securing Oxford as the most popular theory. After decades of failing to convince academia, and two unfavourable moot court decisions in 1987 and 1988, Oxfordians have increasingly availed themselves of popular media coverage in television and newspapers to promote their theories, with some notable success.

In 2007, a 'Declaration of Reasonable Doubt' to encourage new research was signed by more than 1,700 people, including 295 academics. The announcement was timed to coincide with news that Brunel University was offering a one-year MA program on the Shakespeare authorship question. In 2010,Concordia University opened a Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre, under the direction of Shakespeare scholar Daniel Wright.

Unearthing proof

In 1856, Delia Bacon, disdaining research in England's archives to support her ideas, tried to persuade the caretaker of Bacon's tomb at St Albans to open it so she might unearth manuscripts validating her theory which she believed were hidden there. At Stratford, she broke down one night after summoning her courage for hours and testing her strength to prise open the stones by Shakespeare's monument. In 1907, Orville Ward Owen, famous for the gigantic machine he had built to spool through 1,000 feet of cloth, pasted with pages from Elizabethan writers, and detect enciphered messages from Bacon, thought he had decoded 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 failed to retrieve the concealed manuscripts. His former assistant, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, now financed by George Fabyen, had, that same year, likewise set sail for England, after believing she had decoded a different message by means of a bilateral cipher, which indicated that Bacon's secret manuscripts were hidden behind some panels in Canonbury Tower, Islington.

In the 1920s, A clairvoyant lady sailed round the Bermudas in search of the cave where, according to her revelations, Bacon, disguised as a woman, had concealed his manuscripts. In the same decade,Walter Conrad Arensberg, convinced that Bacon had willed the key to his cipher to the Rosicrucians, who apparently survived under the protection of the Church of England, accused the dean of Lichfield of being privy to the secret, and of hiding information that Bacon and his mother had been buried in the Lichfield Chapter house. He waged a long campaign to photograph the obscure grave. Mrs.Maria Bauer convinced herself that Bacon manuscripts had been imported into Jamestown, Virginia in 1653, and could be found in the Bruton Vault at Williamburg. She gained permission in the late 1930s to excavate, but the authorities, quickly disillusioned, withdrew her permit. Roderick Eagle deduced from an account of Edmund Spenser's funeral, that a poem by Bacon, alias 'Shakespeare', would turn up. He too gained permission from the authorities to look inside Spenser's tomb, but found only an old skull and some nondescript bones. The Marlovian Calvin Hoffman was assured by 1956 that proof that Marlowe wrote the plays was buried in Sir Thomas Walsingham's tomb in St. Nicholas's Church, Chislehurst, Kent. Encouraged by many, including apparently, Herbert Hoover, he sailed over, secured permission, and, on opening the tomb, discovered only sand.

In 1940 Charles Wisner Barrell believed he had finally obtained decisive proof that Edward de Vere literally lay behind Shakespeare. X-rays he commissioned of the Ashbourne portrait appeared to yield up evidence that the original was a portrait of de Vere, later tampered with to form an image of a 'Shakespeare'. It has been shown conclusively that the original of the portrait, modified in the mid 19th.century to resemble Shakespeare, was Sir Hugh Hamersley, who is not a candidate, and who sat for it 8 years after Oxford's death.

The Trials of Shakespeare

The authorship question has often been tested by recourse to the framework of trial by jury. The first such occasion was a debate conducted for 15 months in 1892–93 in the Boston monthly The Arena. Ignatius Donnelly was one of the plaintiffs, while F.J.Furnivall formed part of the defence. The jury was composed of 25 members, including Henry George, Edmund Gosse, and Henry Irving. The verdict came down heavily in favour of the man from Stratford. In 1916, a Cook Country Circuit Court judge, Richard Tuthill, found against Shakespeare, and positively determined that Francis Bacon was the author of the works. Damages of $5,000 were awarded the Baconian advocate, Colonel George Fabyan. In the ensuing uproar, Tuthill rescinded his decision, and another judge, Judge Frederick A. Smith, dismissed Fabyan's suit. 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. Ogburn took the verdict as a 'clear defeat' for his cause.

A retrial was organised in the United Kingdom in the expectancy that this decision could be reversed. The moot court, presided over by three Lords, was held in London's Inner Temple on November 26,1988. This time Shakespearean scholars argued their case, and the outcome confirmed the American verdict, and was judged by one de Verean supporter as an 'Oxfordian disaster'. A symposium debating both the theories and the legal aspects was conducted under the auspices of the Tennessee Law review in 2003. William F.Causey, analysing the purely formal legal aspects of the case in terms of US law, concluded that 'Oxfordians should have both the burden of production of evidence and the burden of persuasion with respect to the evidence produced.'

Arguments for 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 Francis Bacon is often cited as a possible author of Shakespeare's plays

Sir Francis Bacon

Main article: Baconian theory

The leading candidate of the 19th century was Sir Francis Bacon, a major scientist, philosopher, courtier, diplomat, essayist, historian and successful politician, who served as Solicitor General (1607), Attorney General (1613) and Lord Chancellor(1618).

Supporters of Bacon draw attention to similarities between a great number of specific phrases and aphorisms from the plays and those written down by Bacon in his wastebook, the Promus. In a letter, addressed to John Davies, Bacon refers to a 'concealed poet', which his supporters take as a confession. 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.

Baconians also believe the circumstances surrounding the first known performance of The Comedy of Errors, and Bacon's personal familiarity with an unpublished letter by William Strachey, upon which many scholars think The Tempest was based, provide a clear connection to Bacon. Also, since Bacon was knowledgeable about government cipher methods, most Baconians see it as feasible that he left his signature somewhere in the Shakespearean work, and numerous ciphers have been proposed as implying that Bacon was the true author.

Bacon privately disavowed the idea he was a poet, and, seen in the context of Bacon's philosophy, the 'concealed poet' is something other than a dramatic or narrative poet. The mainstream historian of authorship doubt, Frank Wadsworth, argued that the 'essential pattern of the Baconian argument' consisted of:

'expressed dissatisfaction with the number of historical records of Shakespeare's career, followed by the substitution of a wealth of imaginative conjectures in their place.'

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford is the leading alternative candidate for the author behind the alleged pseudonym, Shake-Speare

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

Main article: Oxfordian theory

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, after being proposed in the 1920s quickly overtook Bacon to become the most popular alternative candidate, and remains so to this day.

Oxfordians point to the fact that contemporaries as various as Gabriel Harvey(1579), George Puttenham (1589) and Francis Meres(1598) acclaimed de Vere as an accomplished poet and playwright,. They note his personal connections to London theatre and the contemporary playwrights of Shakespeare's day. 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.

The case for Oxford's authorship is also based on perceived similarities between Oxford's biography and events in Shakespeare's plays, sonnets and longer poems; parallels of language, idiom, and thought between Oxford's personal letters and the Shakespearean canon, and underlined passages in Oxford's personal bible, which Oxfordians believe correspond to quotations in Shakespeare's plays. Confronting the issue of Oxford's death in 1604, several years before the Tempest Oxfordian researchers cite examples they say imply the writer known as "Shakespeare" or "Shake-speare" died before 1609, point to 1604 as the year regular publication of "new" or "augmented" Shakespeare plays stopped, and question the evidence that plays like the Tempest relied on sources published after that date. Oxfordians also argue that while 'Shaksper' died in 1616, writings of Shakespeare postdating 1604, the date of de Vere's death, were either revisions by others of de Vere's manuscripts, or, in the case of the Tempest (1611) not written by 'Shakespeare'. Proponents of other candidates do not share this view.

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.

The mainstream replies that Oxford lacked a university education: that he was a poor scholar of Latin: that extravagant praise for deVere's poetry was a convention of flattery:that he was a mediocre poet: that he was patron for an acting company from 1580 to 1602 which did not produce Shakespeare's plays: that there is no significant statistical correlation between the annotations in the Geneva Bible and biblical references in Shakespeare:that the styles of Shakespeare and Oxford, under the most thorough recent computer analysis, are 'light years apart': and that, while the First Folio shows traces of a dialect identical to Shakespeare's, the Earl of Oxford, raised in Essex, spoke an East Anglian dialect. Steven May, the reigning authority on de Vere's poetry, argues that Oxfordian attempts to relate the Earl's poetry to Shakespeare is based on 'a hopelessly flawed methodology', in that Looney assigned to de Vere poems he hadn't written. Contemporary writers exaggerated de Vere's poetic accomplishments in deference to his rank, and the testimony of Meres that de Vere was 'best for comedy' is followed by a further comment naming Shakespeare, which shows Meres knew that Oxford and Shakespeare were not the same man. Further, attribution studies, which have shown certain plays in the canon were written by two or three hands, are a 'nightmare' for Oxfordians, implying a 'jumble sale scenario' for his literary remains long after his death. Also, catalogues of similarities between incidents in the plays and the life of an aristocrat are flawed as arguments because similar lists of parallels have been drawn for many candidates, from Bacon to William Stanley. Finally, Vaughan and Reedy have reaffirmed the orthodox view that William Strachey's "True Reportory" was used as a source for The Tempest, a letter that was not despatched to England until July 1610, six years after Oxford's death.

Christopher Marlowe has been cited as a possible author for Shakespeare's works

Christopher Marlowe

Main article: Marlovian theory

Although born only two months before Shakespeare, Marlowe is recognized as the major contemporary influence on him. For Marlovians he is the only candidate who, had he not been killed at the age of 29, demonstrated the potential to touch 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.

Although the inquest appears to have been held illegally, mainstream scholars accept it as evidence of Marlowe's death. While many detect Marlowe's influence in such things as blank verse rhythm, stateliness, high poetic tone and psychological penetration, others argue the relationship was dynamic and reciprocal. Shakespeare, in innumerable touches, phrases and quotations, remembered and echoed Marlowe in a complimentary fashion, but his verse style is never quite the same, they say, and his stylometric profile sometimes quite distinct. His restricted imagery and vocabulary, lack of comedy, and characteristic hero-types seem to them to suggest a different writer.

William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby was reported to be writing plays for the "common players".

William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby

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. Tillerton in 1913 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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