Shakespeare authorship question

This portrait, called the Chandos portrait, hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. It is generally assumed to be a depiction of William Shakespeare, but this identification is not universally accepted.

The conventional view is that William Shakspere [sic] of Stratford wrote the plays and poetry as William Shakespeare. The term Shakespearean authorship normally refers to the alternative authorship candidates proposed.

Overview

The historical records shows that from the 1590s to the 1620s, a number of plays and poems were published under the name 'William Shakespeare', and that one of the companies (the Lord Chamberlaine's Men) that performed these plays included an actor of that name. This actor is usually identified with the William Shakspere [sic] who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon since the latter left gifts to actors belonging to the London company in his will. The issue is whether or not the actor is also the author of the works bearing his name. Evidence often cited in favour of this thesis is that dedications prefacing the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare's works refer to the "Swan of Avon" and the "Stratford monument". This supports the orthodox view that William Shakspere of Stratford left his home town, joined a company of players, and worked in London as a playwright and poet.

Anti-Stratfordians depart from this position by arguing that Shakspere's contemporaries, notably Henry Chettle (masquerading as Robert Greene), Ben Jonson, and John Marston doubted his authorship credentials and that the above-mentioned First Folio tributes are too cryptic to be reliable. They also claim that certain plays (e.g. The Tempest, Comedy of Errors and Love's Labour's Lost) were produced under circumstances that point unfavourably to Shakspere's authorship. Their conclusion is that Shakspere the actor from Stratford was a 'front' for another writer who wished to remain secret. The 'authorship debate' thus revolves around two questions: Is there reasonable doubt against Shakspere's authorship claim? And if so, who is the secret author hiding behind his name?

In the 19th century the most popular alternative candidate was Sir Francis Bacon. Many 19th century doubters, however, declared themselves agnostics and refused to endorse an alternative. The American populist poet Walt Whitman gave voice to this skepticism when he told Horace Traubel, "I go with you fellows when you say no to Shaksper [sic]: that's about as far as I have got. As to Bacon, well, we'll see, we'll see." Since the 1980s, the most popular candidate has been Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, whose case was put forward by John Thomas Looney in 1920, and Charlton Ogburn in 1984. The poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe has also been a popular candidate. Many other candidates have been suggested but have failed to gather large followings.

Terminology

Stratfordians and anti-Stratfordians

Those who question whether William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of Shakespeare's plays call themselves anti-Stratfordians. They call those who have no such doubts Stratfordians. "Stratfordians" themselves view the question of authorship as settled, and thus do not use a name for themselves.

Terms for adherents to specific candidates

Those anti-Stratfordians who identify Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe as the author of Shakespeare's plays are commonly referred to as Baconians, Oxfordians, and Marlovians, respectively.

Shaksper vs. Shakespeare

There was no standardised spelling in Elizabethan England and Shakspere of Stratford's name was spelled in many different ways throughout his lifetime, including "Shakespeare". Anti-Stratfordians conventionally refer to the man from Stratford as "Shakspere", the name recorded at his baptism, to distinguish him from the author "Shakespeare" or "Shake-speare" who they claim has a different identity.

Common arguments

The conventional view is that Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564. He then moved to London and became a poet, a playwright, an actor, part-owner of the Globe Theatre in London and a member of the favoured acting company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men). He divided his time between London and Stratford, and retired there in 1613 before his death in 1616.

Shakespeare's life

Anti-Stratfordians frequently state that we know little of Shakespeare's life, though mainstream scholars respond that we know more about him than we do about any other dramatist of the period (other than Ben Jonson).

Shakespeare's reputation

Shakspere's name appears on the title pages of fourteen of the fifteen works published during his lifetime. It is also known that William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon was an actor and shareholder in the King's Men at London's Globe Theatre where the plays were produced. In 1623, after the death of all proposed candidates, the plays were collected for publication in the First Folio edition, and Ben Jonson's eulogy refers to the "Sweet Swan of Avon". Anti-Stratfordians regard this eulogy as too cryptic to qualify as evidence.

Shakespeare's education

Shakespeare's signature, from his will, speaks against the theory that the William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was completely illiterate.

Shakespeare's literacy

There is no evidence that Shakspere received any education, although the probability is that he attended the King's New School in Stratford until the age of fourteen. Shakespeare's father, wife, and at least one of his two daughters appear to have been illiterate beyond signing their own names, however, being in repertory theatre where an actor was required to learn many parts in a short time, it seems that William Shakspere could at least read well.

There are several signatures from this time almost universally accepted as valid. The surviving signatures of Shakspere show that he spelled his name in several different ways. However, there was no standardised orthography at the time (for example, early editions of the works of the university-educated Christopher Marlowe spell his name as Marlowe, Marlo, Marlow, Marklin, and Marley).

Self education

It is known that the dramatist Ben Jonson, who rose to become court poet and was a man with similar humble origins to Shakspere, had access to a substantial library where he supplemented his education. There is no evidence that Shakspere had such privilege. Several books owned by Ben Jonson have been found signed and annotated by him but no book has ever been proved to have been owned by Shakspere.

Shakespeare's will

William Shakspere's will is long and explicit, listing the possessions of a successful bourgeois in detail, but is remarkable for containing no mention at all of personal papers, manuscripts, or books (books were rare and expensive items at the time). At the time of Shakspere's death, 18 plays were still unpublished or unperformed and although manuscripts of plays were usually owned by the theatre company, it is unlikely that they would have all been in their possession. In contrast, Sir Francis Bacon mentions work that he wished to be published after his death in both of his wills.

The will also specifies that sums of money are be left to purchase rings of friendship for Richard Burbage, John Heminge and Henry Condell - all three members of the Chamberlain's/King's Men. Heminge and Condell later wrote dedications for the First Folio of 1623.

Shakespeare's class

Anti-Stratfordians argue that a provincial glovemaker's son could never have written plays that deal with the activities of the nobility, which most of Shakespeare's plays do. Orthodox scholars respond that the glamorous world of the aristocracy was a popular setting for most plays in this period. They add that numerous English Renaissance playwrights, including Christopher Marlowe, John Webster, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and others wrote about the nobility despite their own humble origins.

Anti-Stratfordians often argue that the plays show a detailed understanding of courtly life that would have been impossible to attain without an aristocratic upbringing. Orthodox scholars respond that Shakespeare was an upwardly mobile man: like many playwrights, he was patronised by an aristocrat, the Earl of Southampton, and his company regularly performed at court; he thus had ample opportunity to observe courtly life. In addition, his theatrical career made him wealthy and he eventually acquired a coat of arms for his family and the title of gentleman, like many other wealthy middle class men in this period. Against this argument is the fact that it took Ben Jonson (who had a similar low class to Shakspere) 12 years from his first play to obtain noble patronage from Prince Henry for his commentary The Masque of Queens (1609). Jonson's work was more popular than the Shakespeare work at the time. Is it then credible to expect Shakspere to have obtained the Earl of Southampton's patronage for the long poem Venus and Adonis (1593) after only four years of work?

Evidence in the poems

Both orthodox scholars and anti-Stratfordians have used Shakespeare's sonnets as evidence for their positions.

Orthodox scholars assert that the opening lines of Sonnet 135 are strong evidence against any alternate author, or at least any not named William:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;

More than enough am I that vex thee still,

To thy sweet will making addition thus. (the italics and capitalisation are those of the original text)

The italicised puns on Shakespeare's name continue in Sonnet 136 which concludes "And then thou lovest me, for my name is Will".

While Oxfordians contend that a nobleman would not have wanted to be known as a playwright, orthodox scholars point out that this argument does not apply to poetry, which was a skill expected of an Elizabethan courtier. Poems such as Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece or Venus and Adonis, long narrative works on classical subjects, were a prestigious and respectable form of composition, unlike 'merely popular' plays. Oxfordians respond that the contents of the Sonnets, as well as the narrative poems, touched on matters of political scandal which positively required the adoption of a nom de plume by the author. They cite Sonnet 76 as clear evidence of the author's confession of the need for such a ruse:

Why write I still all one, ever the same,

And keep invention in a noted weed,

That every word doth almost tell my name,

Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?

Orthodox scholars find it significant that both of Shakespeare's major poetic works, the narrative poems and the sonnets, were published immediately after periods in which the theatres had been closed by an outbreak of plague. This pattern, it is suggested, is more consistent with composition by a professional dramatist looking for an alternate source of income than a rich dilettante composing coincidentally during a theatre closing.

Cryptograms

It is unfortunate for scholarship, that spiritualists and followers of the cabbalistic faith have hijacked the authorship question to propagate their own agendas.

Ignatius Donelly, a U.S. Congressman, science fiction author, and Atlantis theorist, wrote The Great Cryptogram (1888), in which he claimed to have found encoded messages in the plays attributing authorship to Francis Bacon—encoded messages that Donelly alone could discern, however.

The 19th-century authorial debate placed great emphasis on discerning authorial cryptograms in Shakespeare's works. Elizabeth Wells Gallup examined Bacon's "bi-lateral cipher" (in which two typefaces were used as a method of encoding) and announced that Bacon was not only the author of the Shakespearean works but also the eldest child of Queen Elizabeth, the product of a secret marriage. However, only Ms. Gallup could reliably distinguish between the "two" fonts.

A common example of a word which looks like an encrypted message of some kind is the word honorificabilitudinitatibus, used in Love's Labour's Lost. Its significance is that it can, among many other anagrams, be rearranged into "HI LUDI F. BACONIS NATI TUITI ORBI", translated by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence as "These plays, F. Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world". Unfortunately for those seeing more than an unusual word, it had been used (though rarely) by other writers before Shakespeare. Honorificabilitudo appears in a Latin charter of 1187, and occurs as honorificabilitudinitas in 1300. Dante cites honorificabilitudinitate as a typical example of a long word in De Vulgari Eloquentia II. vii. Thomas Nashe used the word in 1599 (cited by the Oxford English Dictionary; see honorificabilitudinitatibus). It also occurs in The Complaynt of Scotland, and in John Marston's play The Dutch Courtesan (1605).

A Shakespeare-related cryptogram is supposedly present in Psalm 46 of the King James Bible. The 46th word from the beginning of the psalm is "shake"; the 47th word from the end of the psalm, counting backwards, is "spear" (if one omits the final word of the Psalm, this is the 46th word counting backwards). In contrast, in the Bishops' Bible (published in 1568, when Shakespeare was four years old) '"shake" is 47 words from the beginning and "spear" 48 from the end. In the Geneva Bible (1560), the numbers are 47 and 45. In Miles Coverdale's translation of the psalm, which appeared in the Book of Common Prayer of the 1540s, the numbers are 46 and 48. This is supposed by some to be cryptographic evidence that Shakespeare had a hand in writing the King James Bible. It has also been claimed that similar hidden cryptograms, supporting both Shakespeare's and Marlowe's authorship, can be found in the Sonnets.

In 2006, Daily Telegraph puzzlist Barry R. Clarke [[1]]discovered three interesting occurrences of the name Bacon in two dedications prefacing the First Folio and in the Sonnets dedication. These were the only three signed by initials.

Whether or not a "message" has intentionally been placed in a piece of text must depend on the economics of type-setting it, the flexibility in interpreting the concealed letters, the inner logic of the message, and whether or not the cryptographer had a strong enough motive for concealment.

Geographical knowledge

Some anti-Stratfordians believe that the plays must have been written by a well-travelled man, as many of them are set in European countries. Orthodox scholars respond that numerous plays of this period by other playwrights are set in foreign locations and Shakespeare is thus entirely conventional in this regard. In addition, in many cases Shakespeare did not invent the setting, but borrowed it from the source he was using for the plot.

Even outside of the authorship question, there has been debate about the extent of geographical knowledge displayed by Shakespeare. Some scholars argue that there is very little topographical information in the texts (nowhere in Othello or the Merchant of Venice are Venetian canals mentioned). Indeed, there are apparent mistakes: for example, Shakespeare refers to Bohemia as having a coastline in The Winter's Tale (the country is landlocked) and in All's Well That Ends Well he suggests that a journey from Paris to Northern Spain would pass through Italy.

Answers to these objections have been made by other scholars (both orthodox and anti-Stratfordian). It has been noted that The Merchant of Venice demonstrates some knowledge of the city: it uses the local word, traghetto, for the Venetian mode of transport (printed as 'traject' in the published texts; see John Russell Brown, ed. The Merchant of Venice, Arden Edition, 1961, note to Act 3, Sc.4, p.96). One explanation for Bohemia having a coastline is the author's awareness that the kingdom of Bohemia at one time stretched to the Adriatic (see J.H. Pafford, ed. The Winter's Tale, Arden Edition, 1962, p. 66). Oxfordians find it significant that the Earl of Oxford was travelling in the Adriatic region during the brief span of time in which Bohemia did in fact have a coastline.

Anti-Stratfordians assume that the above information could only be obtained from first-hand experience of the regions under discussion; they thus argue that the author of the plays must have been a diplomat, aristocrat or politician. Orthodox scholars believe that this information could easily have been picked up in London from books or from conversations.

Throughout Shakespeare's works there are references to distinctive English flora and fauna. It has been argued that Shakespeare refers to these using colloquial names only found in the Warwickshire area, for example 'love in idleness' from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Such references are so frequent in Shakespeare's work that many scholars believe that they could only be written by a man of Warwickshire. Oxfordians argue that the Earl of Oxford had a house in the Stratford area but records suggest he never visited there, let alone spent enough time to assimilate local dialect.

Other evidence

There are no comments about veiled authorship in Ben Jonson's private diaries of the time, nor in any of the known gossip reports of the time or the succeeding few decades (e.g., Aubrey's Lives or Pepys's Diary). Argument from absence is tricky and rarely compelling at best, but in this case certainly is supportive of the Stratfordian position.

Candidates and their champions

Main article: List of people theorised to have written Shakespeare

As early as the 18th century, unorthodox views of Shakespeare were expressed in two allegorical stories. In The Life and Adventures of Common Sense (1769) by Herbert Lawrence, Shakespeare is portrayed as a "shifty theatrical character ... and incorrigible thief" (Michell). In The Story of the Learned Pig (1786) by an anonymous author described as "an officer of the Royal Navy," Shakespeare is merely a front for the real author, a chap called "Pimping Billy."

Around this time, James Wilmot, a Warwickshire clergyman and scholar, was researching a biography on Shakespeare. He travelled extensively around Stratford, visiting the libraries of country houses within a radius of fifty miles looking for records or correspondence connected with Shakespeare or books that had been owned by him. By 1781, Wilmot had become so appalled at the lack of evidence for Shakespeare that he concluded he could not be the author of the works. Wilmot was familiar with the writings of Francis Bacon and formed the opinion that he was more likely the real author of the Shakespearean canon. He confided this to one James Cowell. Cowell disclosed it in a paper read to the Ipswich Philosophical Society in 1805 (Cowell's paper was only rediscovered in 1932).

These stories were soon forgotten. However, Bacon would emerge again as a candidate in the 19th century when, at the height of bardolatry, the "authorship question" was popularised.

Sir Francis Bacon

Sir Francis Bacon is often cited as a possible author of Shakespeare's plays.

In 1856, William Henry Smith put forth the claim that the author of Shakespeare's plays 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).

Smith was supported by Delia Bacon in her book The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded(1857), in which she maintains that Shakespeare was in fact a group of writers, including Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser, for the purpose of inculcating a philosophic system, for which they felt that they themselves could not afford to assume the responsibility. She professed to discover this system beneath the superficial text of the plays. Constance Mary Fearon Pott (1833-1915) adopted a modified form of this view, founding the Francis Bacon Society in 1885, and publishing her Bacon-centred theory in Francis Bacon and his secret society (1891).

Supporters of Bacon draw attention to similarities between specific phrases from the plays and those written down by Bacon in his own hand, the "Promus". The Promus was a private notebook and was unknown to the public for a period of more than 200 years after it was written. A great number of these entries are reproduced in the Shakespeare plays. It is significant that the unique Shakespeare phrases found in the Promus precede publication and the performance dates of those plays. Another link is the Northumberland Manuscript, an Elizabethan document discovered in 1869 that has both Bacon and Shakespeare's names written together many times over on the same page with titles of Shakespeare plays.

Having outlined both a scientific and moral philosophy in his Advancement of Learning (1605) only his scientific philosophy was published during his lifetime (Novum Organum 1620). This leads to an alternative view that Bacon worked alone on the Shakespeare work as a vehicle for conveying his moral philosophy to the aristocracy. Any serious authorship candidate requires a convincing motive for maintaining secrecy. Bacon's main aim in life was to set up new institutes of learning to develop his Great Instauration (Renewal of Learning) project. The claim is, that to gain the requisite influence he needed to attain high office but a reputation as a dramatist (then a low-class profession) would have seriously impeded his prospects. Realising that play-acting was used by the ancients "as a means of educating men's minds to virtue", Bacon left his moral views to posterity in the Shakespeare plays (for example, the nature of good government - Henry IV, Part 2).

The Earl of Oxford, from the 1914 publication English Travellers of the Renaissance by Clare Howard

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

Main article: Oxfordian theory

The most popular latter-day candidate is Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. This theory was first proposed by J. Thomas Looney in 1920, whose work persuaded Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles, Marjorie Bowen, and many other early 20th-century intellectuals . The theory was brought to greater prominence by Charlton Ogburn's The Mysterious William Shakespeare (1984). Oxford rapidly became the favored alternative to the orthodox view of authorship. Advocates of Oxford are usually referred to as Oxfordians.

Oxfordians base their arguments on what they consider to be striking similarities between Oxford's biography and some events in Shakespeare's plays. Oxfordians also point to the acclaim of Oxford's contemporaries regarding his talent as a poet and a playwright; his closeness to Queen Elizabeth I and Court life; underlined passages in his Bible that may correspond to quotations in Shakespeare's plays ; supposedly parallel phraseology and similarity of thought between Shakespeare's work and Oxford's extant letters and acknowledged poetry (Fowler 1986); and his extensive education and intelligence.

Supporters of the orthodox view would dispute most if not all of these contentions. For them, the most compelling evidence against Oxford is that he died in 1604, whereas about eleven plays by Shakespeare appear to have been written after that date, with the last being written in 1613 (most Oxfordians argue, however, that orthodox scholars have misdated the plays, and suggest alternative chronologies that fit their candidate). Many mainstream scholars also consider Oxford's published poems to be inept and to bear no stylistic resemblance to the works of Shakespeare. Oxfordians counter that argument by pointing out that the published Oxford poems are those of a very young man, and as such are juvenilia.

Christopher Marlowe

Main article: Marlovian theory

Christopher Marlowe has been cited as a possible author for Shakespeare's works, but was assumed to be dead during most of Shakespeare's career.

The gifted playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe has been a popular candidate even though he was apparently dead when most of the plays were written. A case for Marlowe was made as early as 1895, but the creator of the most detailed theory of Marlowe's authorship was Calvin Hoffman, an American journalist whose book on the subject, The Murder of the Man who was Shakespeare, was published in 1955.

According to history, Marlowe was killed in 1593 by a group of men including Ingram Frizer, a servant of Lord Walsingham, Marlowe's patron. A theory has developed that Marlowe, who may have been facing an impending death penalty for heresy, was saved by the faking of his death with the aid of his patron's brother, the spymaster Francis Walsingham, and that he subsequently wrote the works of Shakespeare.

Supporters of Marlovian theory also point to stylometric tests and studies of parallel phraseology, which seem to prove how "both" authors used similar vocabulary and a similar style. .

Orthodox scholars find the argument for Marlowe's faked death unconvincing. They also find Marlowe's and Shakespeare's writing very different, and attribute any similarities to the popularity and influence of Marlowe's work on subsequent dramatists such as Shakespeare.

Sir Henry Neville

Sir Henry Neville, Elizabethan diplomat, 1562 - 1615

The most recent candidate is Sir Henry Neville, a contemporary Elizabethan English diplomat who was a distant relative of Shakespeare. In The Truth Will Out, published in 2005, authors Brenda James, a part-time lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, and Professor William Rubinstein, professor of history at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, argue that Neville's career placed him in the locations of many of the plays about the time they were written and that his life contains parallels with the events in the plays.

In particular, James and Rubinstein argue that the history plays do not promote the ruling Tudor dynasty, as is commonly stated, but instead covertly support the Plantagenet cause; Neville, as a descendant of the Plantagenet dynasty, could not be known as the author. They also claim that newly-discovered documents written by Neville while in the Tower of London contain detailed notes which later ended up in Henry VIII. Neville could have arranged for his distant relative Shakespeare to act as front man.

Others

Other candidates proposed include William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby; Sir Edward Dyer; or Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland (sometimes with his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Philip Sidney, and her aunt Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, as co-authors); and at least fifty others, including Queen Elizabeth (based on a supposed resemblance between a portrait of the Queen and the engraving of Shakespeare that appears in the First Folio). Malcolm X argued that Shakespeare was actually King James I.

Delia Bacon's view that the plays were the work of a secret society rather than one individual has also been revived. Dion Fortune (penname of Violet Mary Firth) and other students of the occult have argued that Shakespeare and many of his contemporaries were in a secret society interested in hermeticism, rosecrucianism and alchemy.

Following suggestions by Arab writers that the plays, especially Othello, demonstrated knowledge of Arabic and Islamic culture, the nineteenth century Arab scholar Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq (1804-87) suggested that Shakespeare or his family were orginally Arabic, and that the name is a corruption of the Arabic Shaykh Zubair. The theory was referred to in a speech by Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi. Some sources suggest that the reference was a joke, others that it was serious.

Academic authorship debates

Main articles: Shakespeare's collaborations, Shakespeare Apocrypha.

The question of whether Shakespeare's canon was written by someone else is generally dismissed in mainstream scholarship. However other questions relating to the authorship of some plays are subject to debate among professional scholars of literature. These include the question of whether some of Shakespeare's plays are collaborations with another dramatist (see Shakespeare's collaborations) and whether some plays outside the traditional canon may in fact have been written by Shakespeare (see Shakespeare Apocrypha).

Further reading

Orthodox / neutral

• Bertram Fields, Players: The Mysterious Identity of William Shakespeare (2005)
• H. N. Gibson, The Shakespeare Claimants (London, 1962). (An overview written from an orthodox perspective).
• E.A. Honigman: The Lost Years, 1985.
• John Michell, Who Wrote Shakespeare? (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). ISBN 0-500-28113-0. (An overview from a neutral perspective, slightly tongue-in-cheek).
• Irvin Leigh Matus, Shakspeare, in Fact (London: Continuum, 1999). ISBN 0826409288. (Orthodox response to the Oxford theory).
• Ian Wilson: Shakespeare - The Evidence, 1993.
• Scott McCrea: "The Case for Shakespeare", (Westport CT: Praeger, 2005). ISBN 0-275-98527-X.
• Bob Grumman: "Shakespeare & the Rigidniks", (Port Charlotte FL: The Runaway Spoon Press, 2006). ISBN 57141-072-4.

Oxfordian

• Mark Anderson, "Shakespeare" By Another Name (2005).
• Al Austin and Judy Woodruff, The Shakespeare Mystery, 1989 Frontline documentary. [2]. (Film about the Oxford case.)
• J. Thomas Looney, Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (London: Cecil Palmer, 1920). [3]. (The first book to promote the Oxford theory.)
• Charlton Ogburn Jr., The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Mask. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1984). (Influential book that criticises orthodox scholarship and promotes the Oxford theory).
• Diana Price, Unorthodox Biography: New Evidence of An Authorship Problem (Westport, Ct: Greenwood, 2001). [4]. (Introduction to the supposed evidentiary problems of the orthodox tradition).

Baconian

• Barry R. Clarke,The Shakespeare Puzzle, Lulu Press 2006, ISBN: 141167880X (Daily Telegraph puzzlist)
• Peter Dawkins: The Shakespeare Enigma, Polair Publ., London 2004, ISBN 0-9545389-4-3 (engl.)
• Amelie Deventer von Kunow, Francis Bacon: Last of the Tudors, trans. Willard Parker (1924)
• Penn Leary, Cryptographic Shakespeare (n.d.)

Rutlandian

• Karl Bleibtreu: Der Wahre Shakespeare, Munich 1907, G. Mueller
• Lewis Frederick Bostelmann: Rutland, New York 1911, Rutland publishing company
• Celestin Demblon: Lord Rutland est Shakespeare, Paris 1912, Charles Carrington
• Pierre S. Porohovshikov (Porokhovshchikov): Shakespeare Unmasked, New York 1940, Savoy book publishers
• Ilya Gililov: The Shakespeare Game: The Mystery of the Great Phoenix, New York : Algora Pub., c2003., ISBN 0875861822 , 0875861814 (pbk.) - most recent study of the Rutland theory.

Academic authorship debates

• Jonathan Hope, The Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study (Cambridge University Press, 1994). (Concerned with the 'academic authorship debate' surrounding Shakespeare's collaborations and apocrypha, not with the false identity theories).

External links

Orthodox

• David Kathman and Terry Ross, The Shakespeare Authorship Page (table of contents)
  • Tom Reedy and David Kathman, "How We Know That Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare: The Historical Facts"
• Irvin Leigh Matus's Shakespeare Site (includes several articles defending the orthodox position)
• Truth vs. Theory Shakespeare As Autodidact
  • Irvin Leigh Matus, "The Case for Shakespeare", from Atlantic Monthly, 1991
• T.L. Hubeart, Jr. "The Shakespeare Authorship Question" Brief overview of the rise of anti-Stratfordianism.
• The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust: "Shakespeare's authorship" Brief overview.
• Tom Veal, Stromata Blog Several articles and detailed sceptical reviews of anti-Stratfordian material

Bacon

• The Shakespeare Puzzle A sober investigation by Daily Telegraph puzzlist Barry R. Clarke.
• Paul J. Dupuy, Jr. An Authorship Analysis: Francis Bacon as Shake-speare Extracts from Bacon's work with relevant passages highlighted.
• Lawrence Gerald, Summary of Baconian Evidence for Shakespeare Authorship A website with excellent references and commentary
• Cryptographic Shakespeare Penn Leary's comprehensive website regarding ciphers and the Bacon/Shakespeare controversy.

Marlowe

• Peter Farey's Marlowe Page
• Frontline: Much Ado About Something(website for a TV documentary)
• Marlowe Lives! (collection of articles, documents and links)
• John Baker, The Case for the Christopher Marlowe's Authorship of the Works attributed to William Shakespeare
• Jeffrey Gantz, review of Hamlet, by William Shakespear and Christopher Marlowe: 400th Anniversary Edition (a sceptical review of a Marlovian book)
• Peter Bull, Shakespeare's Sonnets Written by Kit Marlowe

Oxford

• The Shakespeare Fellowship current research on the Oxfordian theory
• Shakespeare Oxford Society
• Michael J. Farrand, "The Man Who Wrote Shakespeare", a narrative poem making the case for Oxford.
• The Case for Oxford in the Atlantic Monthly, 1991 (subscription required).
• Alan H. Nelson's Shakespeare Authorship Pages - created by a biographer of Oxford who does not believe he wrote Shakespeare
• The Shakespeare Mystery (Website for a PBS documentary; includes several articles)
• Joseph Sobran, The Shakespeare Library (collection of Joseph Sobran's Oxfordian columns. Sobran's Alias Shakespeare is mentioned here, also.)
• The Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference A yearly academic conference at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon on Oxfordian theory
• The De Vere Society of Great Britain

Other candidates

• I. Gililov, The Shakespeare Game: The Mystery of the Great Phoenix (original Russian text)
• HenryNeville.com - Website for a book on Sir Henry Neville's authorship
• The URL of Derby (promotes the Earl of Derby)
• Terry Ross, "The Droeshout Engraving of Shakespeare: Why It's NOT Queen Elizabeth"