Shakespeare authorship question - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Image:ShakespeareCandidates1.jpg|thumb|alt=Portraits of Shakespeare and four proposed alternative authors.|Oxford, Bacon, Derby, and Marlowe (clockwise from top left, Shakespeare centre) have each been proposed as the true author. (Clickable image—use cursor to identify.)
poly 1 1 105 1 107 103 68 104 68 142 1 142 Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was an Elizabethan courtier, playwright, lyric poet, sportsman and patron of the arts, and is currently the most popular alternative candidate proposed for the authorship of Shakespeare's works....

poly 107 1 214 1 214 143 145 142 145 104 107 104 Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Albans, KC was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, author and pioneer of the scientific method. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England...

rect 68 106 144 177 William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

poly 1 144 67 144 67 178 106 179 106 291 1 290 Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death.A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May...

poly 145 143 214 143 214 291 108 291 107 179 144 178 William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby

William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby

William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby was an English nobleman. Stanley inherited a prominent social position that was both dangerous and unstable, as his mother was heir to Queen Elizabeth I under the Third Succession Act, a position that fell to his deceased brother's oldest daughter in 1596,...

The Shakespeare authorship question is the argument

Argument

In philosophy and logic, an argument is an attempt to persuade someone of something, or give evidence or reasons for accepting a particular conclusion.Argument may also refer to:-Mathematics and computer science:...

over whether someone other than William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

of Stratford-upon-Avon

Stratford-upon-Avon

Stratford-upon-Avon is a market town and civil parish in south Warwickshire, England. It lies on the River Avon, south east of Birmingham and south west of Warwick. It is the largest and most populous town of the District of Stratford-on-Avon, which uses the term "on" to indicate that it covers...

wrote the works attributed to him. Anti-Stratfordians—a collective term for adherents of the various alternative-authorship theories—say that Shakespeare of Stratford was a front to shield the identity of the real author or authors, who for some reason did not want or could not accept public credit. Although the idea has attracted much public interest, all but a few Shakespeare scholars and literary historians consider it a fringe belief

Fringe theory

A fringe theory is an idea or a collection of ideas that departs significantly from the prevailing or mainstream view in its particular field of study. Examples include ideas that purport to be scientific theories but have little or no scientific support, conspiracy theories, unproven esoteric...

and for the most part disregard it except to rebut or disparage the claims.

Shakespeare's authorship was first questioned in the middle of the 19th century, when adulation of Shakespeare

Bardolatry

Bardolatry is a term that refers to the excessive adulation of William Shakespeare, a portmanteau of "bard" and "idolatry." Shakespeare has been known as "the Bard" since the nineteenth century. One who idolizes Shakespeare is known as a Bardolater....

as the greatest writer of all time had become widespread. Shakespeare's biography, particularly his humble origins and obscure life, seemed incompatible with his poetic eminence and his reputation for genius, arousing suspicion that Shakespeare might not have written the works attributed to him. The controversy has since spawned a vast body of literature, and more than 70 authorship candidates have been proposed, including Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon

, the 6th Earl of Derby

William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby

, Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe

, and the 17th Earl of Oxford

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

.

Supporters of alternative candidates argue that theirs is the more plausible author, and that William Shakespeare lacked the education, aristocratic sensibility, or familiarity with the royal court that they say is apparent in the works. Those Shakespeare scholars who have responded to such claims hold that biographical interpretations of literature are unreliable in attributing authorship, and that the convergence of documentary evidence for Shakespeare's authorship—title pages, testimony by other contemporary poets and historians, and official records—is the same as that for any other authorial attribution of the time. No such supporting evidence

Direct evidence

Direct evidence supports the truth of an assertion directly, i.e., without an intervening inference...

exists for any other candidate, and Shakespeare's authorship was not questioned during his lifetime or for centuries after his death.

Despite the scholarly consensus, a relatively small but highly visible and diverse assortment of supporters, including prominent public figures, has questioned the conventional attribution. They work for acknowledgment of the authorship question as a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry and for acceptance of one or another of the various authorship candidates.

Overview

The arguments presented by anti-Stratfordians share several characteristics. They attempt to disqualify William Shakespeare as the author and usually offer supporting arguments for a substitute candidate.
They often postulate some type of conspiracy

Conspiracy theory

A conspiracy theory explains an event as being the result of an alleged plot by a covert group or organization or, more broadly, the idea that important political, social or economic events are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public.-Usage:The term "conspiracy...

that protected the author's true identity, which they say explains why no documentary evidence exists for their candidate and why the historical record supports Shakespeare's authorship.

Most anti-Stratfordians say that the Shakespeare canon exhibits such breadth of learning and intimate knowledge of the Elizabethan and Jacobean

Jacobean era

The Jacobean era refers to the period in English and Scottish history that coincides with the reign of King James VI of Scotland, who also inherited the crown of England in 1603 as James I...

court and politics that no one but a highly educated nobleman or court insider could have written them. Apart from literary references, critical commentary and acting notices, the available data regarding Shakespeare's life consist of mundane personal details such as vital record

Vital record

Vital records are records of life events kept under governmental authority, including birth certificates, marriage licenses, and death certificates. In some jurisdictions, vital records may also include records of civil unions or domestic partnerships....

s of his baptism

Infant baptism

Infant baptism is the practice of baptising infants or young children. In theological discussions, the practice is sometimes referred to as paedobaptism or pedobaptism from the Greek pais meaning "child." The practice is sometimes contrasted with what is called "believer's baptism", or...

, marriage and death, tax records, lawsuits to recover debts, and real estate transactions. In addition, no document attests that he received an education. No personal letters or literary manuscripts certainly written by Shakespeare of Stratford survive. To sceptics, this suggests the profile of a person which differs markedly from that of the author of the plays and poetry. Some prominent public figures, including Mark Twain

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...

, Helen Keller

Helen Keller

Helen Adams Keller was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree....

, Henry James

Henry James

Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

, Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

, Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin

Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...

and Orson Welles

Orson Welles

George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...

, have found the arguments against Shakespeare’s authorship persuasive, and their endorsements are an important element in many anti-Stratfordian arguments.

At the core of the argument is the nature of acceptable evidence used to attribute works to their authors. Anti-Stratfordians rely on what they designate as circumstantial evidence

Circumstantial evidence

Circumstantial evidence is evidence in which an inference is required to connect it to a conclusion of fact, like a fingerprint at the scene of a crime...

: similarities between the characters and events portrayed in the works and the biography of their preferred candidate; literary parallels with the known works of their candidate; and hidden codes and cryptographic

Cryptography

Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...

allusions in Shakespeare's own works or texts written by contemporaries. By contrast, academic Shakespeareans and literary historians rely on documentary evidence

Documentary evidence

Documentary evidence is any evidence introduced at a trial in the form of documents. Although this term is most widely understood to mean writings on paper , the term actually include any media by which information can be preserved...

in the form of title page

Title page

The title page of a book, thesis or other written work is the page at or near the front which displays its title and author, usually together with information relating to the publication of the book...

attributions, government records such as the Stationers' Register

Stationers' Register

The Stationers' Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. The company is a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers in England...

and the Accounts of the Revels Office

Master of the Revels

The Master of the Revels was a position within the English, and later the British, royal household heading the "Revels Office" or "Office of the Revels" that originally had responsibilities for overseeing royal festivities, known as revels, and later also became responsible for stage censorship,...

, and contemporary testimony from poets, historians, and those players and playwrights who worked with him, as well as modern stylometric studies

Stylometry

Stylometry is the application of the study of linguistic style, usually to written language, but it has successfully been applied to music and to fine-art paintings as well.Stylometry is often used to attribute authorship to anonymous or disputed documents...

. All these converge to confirm William Shakespeare's authorship. These criteria are the same as those used to credit works to other authors and are accepted as the standard methodology

Scholarly method

Scholarly method or scholarship is the body of principles and practices used by scholars to make their claims about the world as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly public.-Methods:...

for authorship attribution.

Case against Shakespeare's authorship

Very little is known of Shakespeare's personal life, and conclusions based on the gaps in his biography are treated as circumstantial evidence against his fitness for authorship. Further, the lack of biographical information has sometimes been taken as an indication of an organised attempt by government officials to expunge all traces of Shakespeare from the historical record and to conceal the true author's identity. For example, a lack of attendance records for Stratford's grammar school is taken as suggesting that they may have been destroyed to hide proof that Shakespeare did not attend.

Shakespeare's background

Shakespeare was born, married, and buried in Stratford-upon-Avon

Stratford-upon-Avon

, a market town about 100 miles (160.9 km) northwest of London with a population of around 1,500. The town was a centre for the slaughter, marketing, and distribution of sheep, where hides were tanned, and wool traded. Shakespeare maintained a household there throughout the duration of his career in London. Proponents of other candidates often portray the town as a cultural backwater lacking the environment necessary to nurture a genius, and have depicted Shakespeare as ignorant and illiterate.

Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare

John Shakespeare

John Shakespeare was the father of William Shakespeare. He was the son of Richard Shakespeare of Snitterfield, a farmer. He moved to Stratford-upon-Avon and married Mary Arden, with whom he had eight children, five of whom survived into adulthood...

, was a glover and town official. He married Mary Arden, one of the Ardens

Arden family

The Arden family is, according to an article by James Lees-Milne in the 18th edition of Burke's Peerage/Burke's Landed Gentry, volume 1, one of only three families in England that can trace its lineage in the male line back to Anglo-Saxon times...

of Warwickshire

Warwickshire

Warwickshire is a landlocked non-metropolitan county in the West Midlands region of England. The county town is Warwick, although the largest town is Nuneaton. The county is famous for being the birthplace of William Shakespeare...

, a family of the local gentry

Gentry

Gentry denotes "well-born and well-bred people" of high social class, especially in the past....

. Both signed their names with a mark, and no other examples of their writing are extant. This is often used as an indication that Shakespeare was raised in an illiterate household. There is also no evidence that Shakespeare's two daughters were literate, save for two signatures by Susanna

Susanna Hall

Susanna Hall , née Shakespeare, was the eldest child of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, and the older sister of Judith Quiney and Hamnet Shakespeare...

that appear to be "drawn" instead of written with a practised hand. His other daughter, Judith

Judith Quiney

Judith Quiney , née Shakespeare, was the youngest daughter of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. She married Thomas Quiney, a vintner of Stratford-upon-Avon. The circumstances of the marriage, including Quiney's misconduct, may have prompted the rewriting of Shakespeare's will...

, signed a legal document with a mark.

Anti-Stratfordians consider Shakespeare's background incompatible with that attributable to the author of the Shakespeare canon, which exhibits an intimacy with court politics and culture, foreign countries, and aristocratic sports such as hunting, falconry

Falconry

Falconry is "the taking of wild quarry in its natural state and habitat by means of a trained raptor". There are two traditional terms used to describe a person involved in falconry: a falconer flies a falcon; an austringer flies a hawk or an eagle...

, tennis

Real tennis

Real tennis – one of several games sometimes called "the sport of kings" – is the original indoor racquet sport from which the modern game of lawn tennis , is descended...

, and lawn-bowling

Bowls

Bowls is a sport in which the objective is to roll slightly asymmetric balls so that they stop close to a smaller "jack" or "kitty". It is played on a pitch which may be flat or convex or uneven...

. They find that the works show little sympathy for upwardly mobile types such as John Shakespeare and his son, and that the author portrays individual commoners comically, as objects of ridicule. Commoners in groups are said to be depicted typically as dangerous mobs.

Education and literacy

The lack of documentary proof for Shakespeare's education or literacy is often noted in the arguments for alternative candidates. The free King's New School

King Edward VI School Stratford-upon-Avon

King Edward VI School is a voluntary aided boys grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England...

in Stratford, established 1553, was about 0.5 mile (0.80467 km) from Shakespeare's home. Grammar school

Grammar school

A grammar school is one of several different types of school in the history of education in the United Kingdom and some other English-speaking countries, originally a school teaching classical languages but more recently an academically-oriented secondary school.The original purpose of mediaeval...

s varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but the curriculum was dictated by English law; the school would have provided an intensive education in Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

grammar, the classics

Classics

Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...

, and rhetoric

Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...

. The headmaster, Thomas Jenkins, and the instructors were Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

graduates. No student rosters of the period survive, so no documentation exists for the attendance of Shakespeare or any other pupil, nor did anyone who taught at or attended the school ever record that they were his teacher or classmate. This lack of documentation is taken by many anti-Stratfordians as evidence that Shakespeare had little or no education.

Anti-Stratfordians also question how Shakespeare, with no record of the education and cultured background displayed in the works bearing his name, could have acquired the extensive vocabulary found in the plays and poems. The author's vocabulary is calculated to be between 17,500 and 29,000 words. No letters or signed manuscripts written by Shakespeare survive. Shakespeare's six authenticated signatures are written in secretary hand

Secretary hand

Secretary hand is a style of European handwriting developed in the early sixteenth century that remained common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for writing English, German, Welsh and Gaelic....

, a style of handwriting that vanished by 1700, and he used breviograph

Breviograph

A breviograph is a type of scribal abbreviation in the form of an easily written symbol, character, flourish, or stroke based on a modified letter form used to take the place of a common letter combination, especially those occurring at the beginning or end of a word...

s to abbreviate his surname in three of them. The appearance of Shakespeare's surviving signatures, which they characterise as "an illiterate scrawl", is interpreted as indicating that he was illiterate or barely literate.

Name as a pseudonym

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

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

for the true author.

Shakespeare's surname was hyphenated as "Shake-speare" or "Shak-spear" on the title pages of 15 of the 48 individual quarto

Quarto

Quarto could refer to:* Quarto, a size or format of a book in which four leaves of a book are created from a standard size sheet of paper* For specific information about quarto texts of William Shakespeare's works, see:...

(or Q) 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

First Folio

Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. is the 1623 published collection of William Shakespeare's plays. Modern scholars commonly refer to it as the First Folio....

. Of those 15 title pages with Shakespeare's name hyphenated, 13 are on the title pages of just three plays, Richard II
Richard II (play)
King Richard the Second is a history play by William Shakespeare believed to be written in approximately 1595. It is based on the life of King Richard II of England and is the first part of a tetralogy, referred to by some scholars as the Henriad, followed by three plays concerning Richard's...

(Q2 1598, Q3 1598, Q4 1608, and Q5 1615), Richard III
Richard III (play)
Richard III is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1591. It depicts the Machiavellian rise to power and subsequent short reign of Richard III of England. The play is grouped among the histories in the First Folio and is most often classified...

(Q2 1598, Q3 1602, Q4 1605, Q5 1612, and Q6 1622), and Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 1 is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written no later than 1597. It is the second play in Shakespeare's tetralogy dealing with the successive reigns of Richard II, Henry IV , and Henry V...

(Q2 1599, Q3 1604, Q4 1608, and Q5 1613). The hyphen is also present in one cast list

Cast member

A cast member is:* An actor who performs in a theatrical production, motion picture, or television program. The actors who perform in the show are collectively referred to as the cast....

and in six literary allusion

Allusion

An allusion is a figure of speech that makes a reference to, or representation of, people, places, events, literary work, myths, or works of art, either directly or by implication. M. H...

s published between 1594 and 1623. This hyphen use is construed to indicate a pseudonym by anti-Stratfordians, who argue that fictional descriptive names (such as "Master Shoe-tie" and "Sir Luckless Woo-all") were often hyphenated in plays, and pseudonyms such as "Tom Tell-truth" were also sometimes hyphenated.

Reasons proposed for the use of "Shakespeare" as 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

Stigma of print

The stigma of print is the concept that an informal social convention restricted the literary works of aristocrats in the Tudor and Jacobean age to private and courtly audiences — as opposed to commercial endeavors — at the risk of social disgrace if violated, and which obliged the author to...

", a social convention that putatively restricted their literary works to private and courtly audiences—as opposed to commercial endeavours—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, and Marlowe to avoid imprisonment or worse after faking his death and fleeing the country.

Lack of documentary evidence

Proponents of an alternative author say that nothing in the documentary record explicitly identifies Shakespeare as a writer, and that the evidence instead supports a career as a businessman and real-estate investor. Any prominence he might have had in the London theatrical world (aside from his role as a front for the true author) was as a result of his money-lending activities, trading in theatrical properties, and possibly a period as an actor. By this reasoning, all evidence for his literary career was falsified as part of the plan to shield the true author's identity.

All the alternative authorship theories reject the surface meanings of Elizabethan and Jacobean references to Shakespeare as a playwright and instead look for ambiguities and codes. They identify him with such characters as the literary thief Poet-Ape in Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson

Benjamin Jonson was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems...

's poem of the same name and the foolish poetry-lover Gullio in the university play The Return from Parnassus

Parnassus plays

The Parnassus plays are three dramas produced at St John's College, Cambridge, as part of the college's Christmas entertainments towards the end of the 16th century. They are humorous accounts of the adventures of two students, Philomusus and Studioso. The first play The Pilgrimage to Parnassus is...

. Such characters are taken as broad hints indicating that the London theatrical world knew Shakespeare was a front for an anonymous author. Praises of "Shakespeare" the writer are explained as references to the real author's pen-name, not the man from Stratford.

Shakespeare's death

Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 in Stratford, leaving a signed will to direct the disposal of his large estate. The language of the will is mundane and unpoetic and makes no mention of personal papers, books, poems, or the 18 plays that remained unpublished at the time of his death. Its only theatrical reference—monetary gifts to fellow actors to buy mourning ring

Mourning ring

A mourning ring is a finger ring worn in memory of someone who has died. It often bears the name and date of death of the person, and possibly an image of them, or a motto. They were usually paid for by the person commemorated, or their heirs, and often specified, along with the list of intended...

s—was interlined

Interlineation

Interlineation is a legal term that signifies a sentence that is newly inserted between previous sentences in a contract both parties had agreed upon previously. Interlineations help clarify specific points of a legal contract, and are useful if some of the terms of a contract become unclear later...

after the will had been written, casting suspicion on the authenticity of the bequests.
Any public mourning of Shakespeare's death went unrecorded, and no eulogies or poems memorialising his death were published until seven years later as part of the front matter

Book design

Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components of a book into a coherent whole....

in the First Folio of his plays.

Oxfordians (supporters of the Oxfordian theory

Oxfordian theory

The Oxfordian theory of Shakespearean authorship proposes that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford , wrote the plays and poems traditionally attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. While a large majority of scholars reject all alternative candidates for authorship, popular...

) think that the phrase "our ever-living Poet" (an epithet that commonly eulogised a deceased poet as having attained immortal literary fame), included in the dedication to Shakespeare's sonnets

Shakespeare's sonnets

Shakespeare's sonnets are 154 poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality. All but two of the poems were first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.: Never before imprinted. Sonnets 138 and 144...

that were published in 1609, was a signal that the true poet had died by then. Oxford had died in 1604, five years earlier.

Shakespeare's funerary monument

Shakespeare's funerary monument

The Shakespeare funerary monument is a memorial to William Shakespeare located inside Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, UK, the same church in which Shakespeare was baptised....

in Stratford consists of a half-bust effigy in his likeness with pen in hand and an attached plaque praising his abilities as a writer. The earliest printed image of the figure, in Sir William Dugdale's

William Dugdale

Sir William Dugdale was an English antiquary and herald. As a scholar he was influential in the development of medieval history as an academic subject.-Life:...

Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), differs greatly from its present appearance. Authorship theorists argue that the figure originally portrayed a man clutching a sack of grain or wool that was later altered to help conceal the identity of the true author. Oxfordian Richard Kennedy proposes that the monument was originally built to honour John Shakespeare, William's father, who by tradition was a "considerable dealer in wool".

Case for Shakespeare's authorship

Nearly all academic Shakespeareans believe that the author referred to as "Shakespeare" was the same William Shakespeare who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and who died there in 1616. He became an actor and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men

Lord Chamberlain's Men

The Lord Chamberlain's Men was a playing company for whom Shakespeare worked for most of his career. Formed at the end of a period of flux in the theatrical world of London, it had become, by 1603, one of the two leading companies of the city and was subsequently patronised by James I.It was...

(later the King's Men

King's Men (playing company)

The King's Men was the company of actors to which William Shakespeare belonged through most of his career. Formerly known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, it became The King's Men in 1603 when King James ascended the throne and became the company's patron.The...

), the playing company

Playing company

In Renaissance London, playing company was the usual term for a company of actors. These companies were organized around a group of ten or so shareholders , who performed in the plays but were also responsible for management. The sharers employed "hired men" — that is, the minor actors and...

that owned the Globe Theatre

Globe Theatre

The Globe Theatre was a theatre in London associated with William Shakespeare. It was built in 1599 by Shakespeare's playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and was destroyed by fire on 29 June 1613...

, the Blackfriars Theatre

Blackfriars Theatre

Blackfriars Theatre was the name of a theatre in the Blackfriars district of the City of London during the Renaissance. The theatre began as a venue for child actors associated with the Queen's chapel choirs; in this function, the theatre hosted some of the most innovative drama of Elizabeth and...

, and exclusive rights to produce Shakespeare's plays from 1594 to 1642. Shakespeare was also allowed the use of the honorific

Honorific

An honorific is a word or expression with connotations conveying esteem or respect when used in addressing or referring to a person. Sometimes, the term is used not quite correctly to refer to an honorary title...

"gentleman

Gentleman

The term gentleman , in its original and strict signification, denoted a well-educated man of good family and distinction, analogous to the Latin generosus...

" after 1596 when his father was granted a coat of arms

Coat of arms

A coat of arms is a unique heraldic design on a shield or escutcheon or on a surcoat or tabard used to cover and protect armour and to identify the wearer. Thus the term is often stated as "coat-armour", because it was anciently displayed on the front of a coat of cloth...

.

Shakespeare scholars see no reason to suspect that the name was a pseudonym or that the actor was a front for the author: contemporary records identify Shakespeare as the writer, other playwrights such as Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe

came from similar backgrounds, and no contemporary is known to have expressed doubts about Shakespeare's authorship. While information about some aspects of Shakespeare's life is sketchy, this is true of many other playwrights of the time. Of some, next to nothing is known. Others, such as Jonson, Marlowe, and John Marston

John Marston

John Marston was an English poet, playwright and satirist during the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods...

, are more fully documented because of their education, close connections with the court, or brushes with the law. The argument that there is no evidence of Shakespeare's authorship is a form of fallacious logic known as argumentum ex silentio
Argument from silence
The argument from silence is generally a conclusion based on silence of opponent, failing to give evidence. In the field of classical studies, it often refers to the deduction from the lack of references to a subject in the available writings of an author to the conclusion that he was ignorant of it...

, or argument from silence, since it takes the absence of evidence to be evidence of absence. Scholars employ the same methodology

Historical method

Historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write histories in the form of accounts of the past. The question of the nature, and even the possibility, of a sound historical method is raised in the...

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

Stylometry

. They criticise the methods used to identify alternative candidates as unreliable and unscholarly, and say these methods explain why more than 70 candidates have been identified as the "true" author. They consider the idea that Shakespeare revealed himself autobiographically in his work as a cultural anachronism

Anachronism

An anachronism—from the Greek ανά and χρόνος — is an inconsistency in some chronological arrangement, especially a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other...

: it has been a common authorial practice since the 19th century, but was not during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras.

Historical evidence

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

In 1598 Francis Meres

Francis Meres

Francis Meres was an English churchman and author.He was born at Kirton in the Holland division of Lincolnshire in 1565. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he received a B.A. in 1587 and an M.A. in 1591. Two years later he was incorporated an M.A. of Oxford...

named Shakespeare as a playwright and poet in his Palladis Tamia
Palladis Tamia
Palladis Tamia, subtitled "Wits Treasury", is a 1598 book written by the minister Francis Meres. Meres calls it "A Comparative Discourse of our English Poets, with the Greek, Latin, and Italian Poets", and is important in English literary history as the first critical account of the poems and early...

, referring to him as one of the authors by whom the "English tongue is mightily enriched". He names twelve plays written by Shakespeare, including four which were never published in quarto: The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1590 or 1591. It is considered by some to be Shakespeare's first play, and is often seen as his first tentative steps in laying out some of the themes and tropes with which he would later deal in more...

, The Comedy of Errors
The Comedy of Errors
The Comedy of Errors is one of William Shakespeare's earliest plays. It is his shortest and one of his most farcical comedies, with a major part of the humour coming from slapstick and mistaken identity, in addition to puns and word play. The Comedy of Errors is one of only two of Shakespeare's...

, Love's Labour's Won
Love's Labour's Won
Love's Labour's Won is the name of a play written by William Shakespeare before 1598. The play appears to have been published by 1603, but no copies are known to have survived. One theory holds that it is a lost work, possibly a sequel to Love's Labour's Lost...

, and King John, as well as ascribing to Shakespeare some of the plays that were published anonymously before 1598—Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, and possibly George Peele, believed to have been written between 1588 and 1593. It is thought to be Shakespeare's first tragedy, and is often seen as his attempt to emulate the violent and bloody revenge plays of his contemporaries, which were...

, Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written early in the career of playwright William Shakespeare about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular archetypal stories of young, teenage lovers.Romeo and Juliet belongs to a...

, and Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 1 is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written no later than 1597. It is the second play in Shakespeare's tetralogy dealing with the successive reigns of Richard II, Henry IV , and Henry V...

. He refers to Shakespeare's "sug[a]red Sonnets among his private friends" 11 years before the publication of the Sonnets.
In the rigid social structure of Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare was entitled to use the honorific "gentleman" after his father was granted a coat of arms in 1596. This honorific was conventionally designated by the title "Master" or its abbreviations "Mr." or "M." prefixed to the name. The title was included in many contemporary references to Shakespeare, including official and literary records, and identifies William Shakespeare of Stratford as the author. Examples from Shakespeare's lifetime include two official stationers' entries

Stationers' Register

, one dated 23 August 1600 and entered by Andrew Wise

Andrew Wise

Andrew Wise , or Wyse or Wythes, was a London publisher of the Elizabethan era who issued first editions of five Shakespearean plays...

and William Aspley

William Aspley

William Aspley was a London publisher of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline eras. He was a member of the publishing syndicates that issued the First Folio and Second Folio collections of Shakespeare's plays, in 1623 and 1632.-Career:...

: "Entred for their copies vnder the handes of the wardens. Twoo bookes. the one called: Muche a Doo about nothinge

Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy written by William Shakespeare about two pairs of lovers, Benedick and Beatrice, and Claudio and Hero....

. Thother the second parte of the history of kinge henry the iiijth with the humors of Sr John ffalstaff

Henry IV, Part 2

Henry IV, Part 2 is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed written between 1596 and 1599. It is the third part of a tetralogy, preceded by Richard II and Henry IV, Part 1 and succeeded by Henry V.-Sources:...

: Wrytten by mr Shakespere. xij d"; and the other dated 26 November 1607 and entered by Nathaniel Butter

Nathaniel Butter

Nathaniel Butter was a London publisher of the early 17th century. The publisher of the first edition of Shakespeare's King Lear in 1608, he has also been regarded as one of the first publishers of a newspaper in English....

and John Busby: "Entred for their copie under thandes of Sr George Buck knight & Thwardens A booke called. Mr William Shakespeare his historye of Kynge Lear as yt was played before the kinges maiestie at Whitehall vppon St Stephans night at Christmas Last by his maiesties servantes playinge vsually at the globe on the Banksyde vj d", which appeared on the title page of King Lear
King Lear
King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The title character descends into madness after foolishly disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological...

Q1 (1608) as "M. William Shak-speare: HIS True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters".
Shakespeare's social status is also specifically referred to by his contemporaries in Epigram 159 by John Davies of Hereford

John Davies of Hereford

John Davies of Hereford was a writing-master and an Anglo-Welsh poet. He is usually known as John Davies of Hereford in order to distinguish him from others of the same name....

in his The Scourge of Folly (1611): "To our English Terence

Terence

Publius Terentius Afer , better known in English as Terence, was a playwright of the Roman Republic, of North African descent. His comedies were performed for the first time around 170–160 BC. Terentius Lucanus, a Roman senator, brought Terence to Rome as a slave, educated him and later on,...

, Mr. Will. Shake-speare"; Epigram 92 by Thomas Freeman

Thomas Freeman (poet)

Thomas Freeman, , was a minor English Jacobean poet and epigramist who is mostly remembered for writing an early poem addressed to Shakespeare...

in his Runne and A Great Caste (1614): "To Master W: Shakespeare"; and in historian John Stow

John Stow

John Stow was an English historian and antiquarian.-Early life:The son of Thomas Stow, a tallow-chandler, he was born about 1525 in London, in the parish of St Michael, Cornhill. His father's whole rent for his house and garden was only 6s. 6d. a year, and Stow in his youth fetched milk every...

's list of "Our moderne, and present excellent Poets" in his Annales, printed posthumously in an edition by Edmund Howes (1615), which reads: "M. Willi. Shake-speare gentleman".

After Shakespeare's death, Ben Jonson explicitly identified William Shakespeare, gentleman, as the author in the title of his eulogy, "To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us", published in the First Folio (1623). Other poets identified Shakespeare the gentleman as the author in the titles of their eulogies, also published in the First Folio: "Upon the Lines and Life of the Famous Scenic Poet, Master William Shakespeare" by Hugh Holland

Hugh Holland

Hugh Holland , the son of Robert Holland, was born in Denbigh in the north of Wales. He was educated at Westminster School under William Camden, where he excelled in classics, and proceeded in 1589 to Trinity College, Cambridge on a scholarship...

and "To the Memory of the Deceased Author, Master W. Shakespeare" by Leonard Digges

Leonard Digges (writer)

Leonard Digges was an accomplished Hispanist and minor poet, a younger son of the astronomer Thomas Digges Leonard Digges (1588 – 7 April 1635) was an accomplished Hispanist and minor poet, a younger son of the astronomer Thomas Digges Leonard Digges (1588 – 7 April 1635) was an...

Contemporary legal recognition

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

George Buck

Sir George Buck was an antiquarian who served as Master of the Revels to King James I of England.George Buck was educated at the Middle Temple, and served on the successful Cádiz expedition of 1596 under Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex...

served as Deputy Master of the Revels from 1603 and as Master of the Revels

Master of the Revels

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

In 1602, Ralph Brooke

Ralph Brooke

Ralph Brooke was an English Officer of Arms in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. He is known for his critiques of the work of other members of the College of Arms, most particularly in A Discoverie of Certaine Errours Published in Print in the Much Commended 'Britannia' 1594, which touched...

, the York Herald

York Herald

York Herald of Arms in Ordinary is an officer of arms at the College of Arms. The first York Herald is believed to have been an officer to Edmund of Langley, Duke of York around the year 1385, but the first completely reliable reference to such a herald is in February of 1484, when John Water...

, accused Sir William Dethick

William Dethick

Sir William Dethick was a long-serving officer of arms at the College of Arms in London. He was the son of Sir Gilbert Dethick and followed his father as Garter Principal King of Arms...

, the Garter King of Arms, of elevating 23 unworthy persons to the gentry

Gentry

Gentry denotes "well-born and well-bred people" of high social class, especially in the past....

. One of these 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 in 1596. 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

Clarenceux King of Arms

Clarenceux King of Arms is an officer of arms at the College of Arms in London. Clarenceux is the senior of the two provincial kings of arms and his jurisdiction is that part of England south of the River Trent. The office almost certainly existed in 1420, and there is a fair degree of...

William Camden

William Camden was an English antiquarian, historian, topographer, and officer of arms. He wrote the first chorographical survey of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland and the first detailed historical account of the reign of Elizabeth I of England.- Early years :Camden was born in London...

, the foremost antiquary of the time. In his Remaines Concerning Britaine—published in 1605, but finished two years previous and before the Earl of Oxford died in 1604—Camden names Shakespeare as one of the "most pregnant witts of these ages our times, whom succeeding ages may justly admire".

Recognition by fellow actors, playwrights and writers

Actors John Heminges

John Heminges

John Heminges was an English Renaissance actor. Most noted now as one of the editors of William Shakespeare's 1623 First Folio, Heminges served in his time as an actor and financial manager for the King's Men.-Life:Heminges was born in Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire in 1556...

and Henry Condell

Henry Condell

Henry Condell was an actor in the King's Men, the playing company for which William Shakespeare wrote. With John Heminges, he was instrumental in preparing the First Folio, the collected plays of Shakespeare, published in 1623....

knew and worked with Shakespeare for more than 20 years. In the 1623 First Folio, they wrote that they had published the Folio "onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow aliue, as was our Shakespeare, by humble offer of his playes". Playwright and poet Ben Jonson knew Shakespeare from at least 1598, when the Lord Chamberlain's Men performed Jonson's play Every Man in His Humour
Every Man in His Humour
Every Man in His Humour is a 1598 play by the English playwright Ben Jonson. The play belongs to the subgenre of the "humours comedy," in which each major character is dominated by an overriding humour or obsession.-Performance and Publication:...

at the Curtain Theatre

Curtain Theatre

The Curtain Theatre was an Elizabethan playhouse located in Curtain Close, Shoreditch , just outside the City of London. It opened in 1577, and continued staging plays until 1622....

with Shakespeare as a cast member. Scottish poet William Drummond

William Drummond of Hawthornden

William Drummond , called "of Hawthornden", was a Scottish poet.-Life:Drummond was born at Hawthornden Castle, Midlothian. His father, John Drummond, was the first laird of Hawthornden; and his mother was Susannah Fowler, sister of William Fowler, poet and courtier...

recorded Jonson's often contentious comments about his contemporaries: Jonson criticised Shakespeare as lacking "arte" and for mistakenly giving Bohemia

Bohemia

Bohemia is a historical region in central Europe, occupying the western two-thirds of the traditional Czech Lands. It is located in the contemporary Czech Republic with its capital in Prague...

a coast in The Winter's Tale
The Winter's Tale
The Winter's Tale is a play by William Shakespeare, originally published in the First Folio of 1623. Although it was grouped among the comedies, some modern editors have relabelled the play as one of Shakespeare's late romances. Some critics, among them W. W...

. In 1641, four years after Jonson's death, private notes written during his later life were published. In a comment intended for posterity (Timber or Discoveries), he criticises Shakespeare's casual approach to playwriting, but praises Shakespeare as a person: "I loved the man, and do honour 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. . ."

In addition to Ben Jonson, other playwrights wrote about Shakespeare, including some who sold plays to Shakespeare's company. Two of the three Parnassus plays

Parnassus plays

produced at St John's College, Cambridge

St John's College, Cambridge

St John's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college's alumni include nine Nobel Prize winners, six Prime Ministers, three archbishops, at least two princes, and three Saints....

near the beginning of the 17th century mention Shakespeare as an actor, poet, and playwright who lacked a university education. In The First Part of the Return from Parnassus, two separate characters refer 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."

An edition of The Passionate Pilgrim
The Passionate Pilgrim
The Passionate Pilgrim is an anthology of 20 poems that were attributed to "W. Shakespeare" on the title page, only five of which are accepted by present-day scholars as authentically Shakespearean.-Editions:...

, expanded with an additional nine poems written by prominent English actor, playwright, and author Thomas Heywood

Thomas Heywood

Thomas Heywood was a prominent English playwright, actor, and author whose peak period of activity falls between late Elizabethan and early Jacobean theatre.-Early years:...

, was published by William Jaggard

William Jaggard

William Jaggard was an Elizabethan and Jacobean printer and publisher, best known for his connection with the texts of William Shakespeare, most notably the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays...

in 1612 with Shakespeare's name on the title page. Heywood protested this piracy in his Apology for Actors (1612), adding that the author was "much offended with M. Jaggard (that altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name." That Heywood stated with certainty that the author was unaware of the deception, and that Jaggard removed Shakespeare's name from unsold copies even though Heywood did not explicitly name him, indicates that Shakespeare was the offended author. Elsewhere, in his poem "Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels" (1634), Heywood affectionately notes the nicknames his fellow playwrights had been known by. Of Shakespeare, he writes:

Our modern poets to that pass are driven,

Those names are curtailed which they first had given;

And, as we wished to have their memories drowned,

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

Mellifluous Shake-speare, whose enchanting quill

Commanded mirth or passion, was but Will.

Playwright John Webster

John Webster

John Webster was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are often regarded as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. He was a contemporary of William Shakespeare.- Biography :Webster's life is obscure, and the dates...

, in his dedication to The White Devil
The White Devil
The White Devil is a revenge tragedy from 1612 by English playwright John Webster . A notorious failure when it premiered, Webster complained the play was acted in the dead of winter before an unreceptive audience. The play's complexity, sophistication and satire made it a poor fit with the...

(1612), wrote, "And lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right happy and copious industry of M. Shake-Speare, M. Decker, & M. Heywood, wishing what I write might be read in their light", here using the abbreviation "M." to denote "Master", a form of address properly used of William Shakespeare of Stratford, who was titled a gentleman.

In a verse letter to Ben Jonson dated to about 1608, Francis Beaumont

Francis Beaumont

Francis Beaumont was a dramatist in the English Renaissance theatre, most famous for his collaborations with John Fletcher....

alludes to several playwrights, including Shakespeare, about whom he wrote,

... Here I would let slip

(If I had any in me) scholarship,

And from all learning keep these lines as clear

as Shakespeare's best are, which our heirs shall hear

Preachers apt to their auditors to show

how far sometimes a mortal man may go

by the dim light of Nature.

Shakespeare's death—the standard perspective

The monument to Shakespeare

Shakespeare's funerary monument

The Shakespeare funerary monument is a memorial to William Shakespeare located inside Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, UK, the same church in which Shakespeare was baptised....

, erected in Stratford before 1623, bears a plaque with an inscription identifying Shakespeare as a writer. The first two Latin lines translate to "In judgment a Pylian, in genius a Socrates, in art a Maro, the earth covers him, the people mourn him, Olympus possesses him", referring to Nestor

Nestor (mythology)

In Greek mythology, Nestor of Gerenia was the son of Neleus and Chloris and the King of Pylos. He became king after Heracles killed Neleus and all of Nestor's siblings...

, Socrates

Socrates

Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...

, Virgil

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...

, and Mount Olympus

Twelve Olympians

The Twelve Olympians, also known as the Dodekatheon , in Greek mythology, were the principal deities of the Greek pantheon, residing atop Mount Olympus. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Hestia, and Hades were siblings. Ares, Hermes, Hephaestus, Athena, Apollo, and Artemis were children of Zeus...

. The monument was not only 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 in his Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), but the engraving was done from a sketch made in 1634 and, like other portrayals of monuments in his work, is not accurate.

Shakespeare's will, executed 25 March 1616, bequeaths "to my fellows John Hemynge Richard Burbage

Richard Burbage

Richard Burbage was an English actor and theatre owner. He was the younger brother of Cuthbert Burbage. They were both actors in drama....

and Henry Cundell 26 shilling 8 pence apiece to buy them [mourning] rings." Numerous public records, including the royal patent of 19 May 1603 that charter

Charter

A charter is the grant of authority or rights, stating that the granter formally recognizes the prerogative of the recipient to exercise the rights specified...

ed the King's Men, establishes that Phillips, Heminges, Burbage, and Condell were fellow actors in the King's Men with William Shakespeare; two of them later edited his collected plays. Anti-Stratfordians have cast suspicion on these bequests, which were interlined

Interlineation

, and claim that they were added later as part of a conspiracy. However, the will was proved in the Prerogative Court

Prerogative court

A prerogative court is a court through which the discretionary powers, privileges, and legal immunities reserved to the sovereign were exercised. In England in the 17th century a clash developed between these courts, representing the crown's authority, and common law courts. Prerogative courts...

of the Archbishop of Canterbury

Archbishop of Canterbury

The Archbishop of Canterbury is the senior bishop and principal leader of the Church of England, the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of Canterbury. In his role as head of the Anglican Communion, the archbishop leads the third largest group...

(George Abbot) in London on 22 June 1616, and the original will was copied into the court register with the bequests intact.

John Taylor

John Taylor (poet)

John Taylor was an English poet who dubbed himself "The Water Poet".-Biography:He was born in Gloucester, 24 August 1578....

was the first poet to mention in print the deaths of Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont in his 1620 book of poems The Praise of Hemp-seed. Both had died, less than two months apart, four years earlier. Ben Jonson wrote a short poem "To the Reader" commending the First Folio engraving of Shakespeare by Droeshout

Martin Droeshout

Martin Droeshout was an English engraver of Flemish descent, whose fame rests completely on the fact that he made the title portrait for William Shakespeare's collected works, the First Folio of 1623, edited by John Heminges and Henry Condell, fellow actors of the Bard.-Shakespeare:Droeshout would...

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 appear,

And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,

That so did take Eliza, and our James!

Here Jonson links the author to Stratford's river, the Avon, and confirms his appearances at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I.

Leonard Digges

Leonard Digges (writer)

wrote the elegy "To the Memory of the Deceased Author Master W. Shakespeare" that was published in the Folio, in which he refers to "thy Stratford Moniment". Raised on the outskirts of Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1590s, Digges was the stepson of Shakespeare's friend, Thomas Russell, whom Shakespeare in his will designated as overseer to the executors. William Basse

William Basse

William Basse was an English poet. He was a follower of Edmund Spenser. He is now remembered mostly for a eulogy he wrote about Shakespeare.-Life:...

wrote an elegy entitled "On Mr. Wm. Shakespeare" sometime between 1616 and 1623, in which he suggests that Shakespeare should have been buried in Westminster Abbey

Westminster Abbey

The Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, popularly known as Westminster Abbey, is a large, mainly Gothic church, in the City of Westminster, London, United Kingdom, located just to the west of the Palace of Westminster. It is the traditional place of coronation and burial site for English,...

next to Chaucer, Beaumont, and Spenser. This poem circulated very widely in manuscript and survives today in more than two dozen contemporary copies; several of these have a fuller, variant title "On Mr. William Shakespeare, he died in April 1616", which unambiguously specifies that the reference is to Shakespeare of Stratford.

Evidence for Shakespeare's authorship from his works

Shakespeare's are the most-studied secular works in history. Contemporary comments and textual studies support the authorship of someone with an education, background, and life span consistent with that of William Shakespeare.

There is no record that any contemporary of Shakespeare referred to him as a learned writer or scholar. Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont both refer to his lack of classical learning. If a university-trained playwright wrote the plays, it is hard to explain the many classical

Classical antiquity

Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, collectively known as the Greco-Roman world...

blunders in Shakespeare. Not only does he mistake the scansion

Scansion

Scansion is the act of determining and graphically representing the metrical character of a line of verse.-Overview:Systems of scansion, and the assumptions that underlie them, are so numerous and contradictory that it is often difficult to tell whether differences in scansion indicate opposed...

of many classical names, in Troilus and Cressida
Troilus and Cressida
Troilus and Cressida is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1602. It was also described by Frederick S. Boas as one of Shakespeare's problem plays. The play ends on a very bleak note with the death of the noble Trojan Hector and destruction of the love between Troilus...

he has Greeks and Trojans citing Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

and Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

a thousand years before their births. Willinsky suggests that most of Shakespeare's classical allusions were drawn from Thomas Cooper’s

Thomas Cooper (bishop)

Thomas Cooper was an English bishop, lexicographer, and writer.-Life:He was born in Oxford, where he was educated at Magdalen College...

Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1565), since a number of errors in that work are replicated in several of Shakespeare’s plays, and a copy of this book had been bequeathed to Stratford Grammar School by John Brechtgirdle for "the common use of scholars". Later critics such as Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...

remarked that Shakespeare's genius lay not in his erudition, but in his "vigilance of observation and accuracy of distinction which books and precepts cannot confer; from this almost all original and native excellence proceeds."

Shakespeare's plays differ from those of the University Wits

University Wits

The University Wits were a group of late 16th century English playwrights who were educated at the universities and who became playwrights and popular secular writers...

in that they avoid ostentatious displays of the writer's 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 Elizabethan grammar school curriculum. The curriculum began with William Lily's Latin grammar Rudimenta Grammatices and progressed to Caesar

Julius Caesar

Gaius Julius Caesar was a Roman general and statesman and a distinguished writer of Latin prose. He played a critical role in the gradual transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire....

, Livy

Livy

Titus Livius — known as Livy in English — was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people. Ab Urbe Condita Libri, "Chapters from the Foundation of the City," covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome well before the traditional foundation in 753 BC...

, Virgil

Virgil

, Horace

Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...

, Ovid

Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...

, Plautus

Plautus

Titus Maccius Plautus , commonly known as "Plautus", was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus...

, Terence

Terence

, and Seneca

Seneca the Younger

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero...

, all of whom are quoted and echoed in the Shakespearean canon. Almost unique among his peers, Shakespeare's plays are full of phrases from grammar school texts and pedagogy

Pedagogy

Pedagogy is the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching. The term generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction....

, together with caricatures of schoolmasters. Lily's Grammar is referred to in a number of plays, including Titus Andronicus (4.10), The Taming of the Shrew
The Taming of the Shrew
The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1591.The play begins with a framing device, often referred to as the Induction, in which a mischievous nobleman tricks a drunken tinker named Sly into believing he is actually a nobleman himself...

(1.1), Love's Labour's Lost (5.1), Twelfth Night (2.3), and The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Merry Wives of Windsor is a comedy by William Shakespeare, first published in 1602, though believed to have been written prior to 1597. It features the fat knight Sir John Falstaff, and is Shakespeare's only play to deal exclusively with contemporary Elizabethan era English middle class life...

(4.1). Shakespeare alluded not only to grammar school but also to the petty school that children attended at age 5 to 7 to learn to read, a prerequisite for grammar school.

Beginning in 1987, Ward Elliott

Ward Elliott

Ward Elliott is the Burnet C. Wohlford Professor of American Political Institutions at Claremont McKenna College.He researched market solutions to the smog problem in Los Angeles. He was president of the California Coalition for Clean Air from 1980 to 1986. Elliott drafted the economic-incentives...

, who was sympathetic to the Oxfordian theory, and Robert J. Valenza supervised a continuing stylometric study that used computer programs to compare Shakespeare's stylistic habits to the works of 37 authors who had been proposed as the true author. The study, known as the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic, was last held in the spring of 2010. The tests determined that Shakespeare's work shows consistent, countable, profile-fitting patterns, suggesting that he was a single individual, not a committee, and that he used fewer relative clauses and more hyphens, feminine endings, and run-on lines

Enjambment

Enjambment or enjambement is the breaking of a syntactic unit by the end of a line or between two verses. It is to be contrasted with end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line, and caesura, in which the linguistic unit ends mid-line...

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 whose known works have survived—including Oxford, Bacon, and Marlowe—as the true authors of the Shakespeare canon.

Shakespeare's style evolved over time in keeping with changes in literary trends. His late plays, such as The Winter's Tale, The Tempest
The Tempest
The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...

, and Henry VIII

Henry VIII (play)

The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight is a history play by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, based on the life of Henry VIII of England. An alternative title, All is True, is recorded in contemporary documents, the title Henry VIII not appearing until the play's publication...

, are written in a style similar to that of other Jacobean playwrights and radically different from that of his Elizabethan-era plays. In addition, after the King's Men began using the Blackfriars Theatre for performances in 1609, Shakespeare's plays were written to accommodate a smaller stage with more music, dancing, and more evenly divided acts to allow for trimming the candles used for stage lighting.

Dean Keith Simonton, who researches the factors involved in musical and literary creativity, especially Shakespeare's, concludes "beyond a shadow of a doubt" that the consensus play chronology is roughly the correct order, and that Shakespeare's works exhibit gradual stylistic development consistent with that of other artistic geniuses. Simonton's study, published in 2004, examined the correlation between the thematic content of Shakespeare's plays and the political context in which they would have been written. When backdated two years, the mainstream chronologies yield substantial correlations between the two, whereas the alternate chronologies proposed by Oxfordians display no relationship regardless of the time lag. 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".

Shakespeare co-authored half of his last 10 plays, collaborating closely with other playwrights. Oxfordians claim that those plays were finished by others after the death of Oxford. However, textual evidence from the late plays indicate that Shakespeare's collaborators were not always aware of what Shakespeare had done in a previous scene, and that they were following a rough outline rather than working from an unfinished script left by a long-dead playwright. For example, in The Two Noble Kinsmen
The Two Noble Kinsmen
The Two Noble Kinsmen is a Jacobean tragicomedy, first published in 1634 and attributed to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. Its plot derives from "The Knight's Tale" in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales....

(1612–1613), written with John Fletcher, Shakespeare has two characters meet and leaves them on stage at the end of one scene, yet Fletcher has them act as if they were meeting for the first time in the following scene.

Bardolatry and early doubt

Despite adulatory tributes attached to his works, Shakespeare was not considered the world's greatest writer in the century and a half following his death. His reputation was that of a good playwright and poet among many others of his era. Beaumont and Fletcher

Beaumont and Fletcher

Beaumont and Fletcher were the English dramatists Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, who collaborated in their writing during the reign of James I ....

's plays dominated popular taste after the theatres reopened in the Restoration Era in 1660, with Ben Jonson's and Shakespeare's plays vying for second place. After actor David Garrick

David Garrick

David Garrick was an English actor, playwright, theatre manager and producer who influenced nearly all aspects of theatrical practice throughout the 18th century and was a pupil and friend of Dr Samuel Johnson...

mounted the Shakespeare Stratford Jubilee in 1769, Shakespeare led the field. Excluding a handful of minor 18th-century satirical and allegorical

Allegory

Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...

references, there was no suggestion in this period that anyone else might have written the works. The authorship question emerged only after Shakespeare had come to be regarded as the English national poet and a unique genius.

By the beginning of the 19th century, adulation was in full swing, with Shakespeare singled out as a transcendent genius, a phenomenon for which George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

coined the term "bardolatry

Bardolatry

" in 1901. By the middle of the century his genius was noted as much for its intellectual as for its imaginative strength. Since what was known about his life seemed to reveal Shakespeare as an untutored rustic, however, uneasiness began to emerge over the dissonance between Shakespeare's reputation and his biography. Although still convinced that Shakespeare was the author of the works, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...

expressed this disjunction in a lecture in 1846 by allowing that he could not reconcile Shakespeare's verse with the image of a jovial actor and theatre manager. The rise of historical criticism

Historical criticism

Historical criticism, or historical-critical method, and also known as higher criticism, is a branch of literary criticism that investigates the origins of ancient text in order to understand "the world behind the text"....

, which challenged the authorial unity of Homer

Homer

In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...

's epics

Homeric Question

The Homeric Question concerns the doubts and consequent debate over the identity of Homer, the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey, and historicity, especially of the Iliad...

and the historicity of the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

, also fuelled emerging puzzlement over Shakespeare's authorship, which in one critic's view was "an accident waiting to happen". David Strauss

David Strauss

David Friedrich Strauss was a German theologian and writer. He scandalized Christian Europe with his portrayal of the "historical Jesus," whose divine nature he denied...

's investigation of the biography of Jesus

Quest for the Historical Jesus

The quest for the historical Jesus is the attempt to use historical rather than religious methods to construct a verifiable biography of Jesus. As originally defined by Albert Schweitzer, the quest began in the 18th century with Hermann Samuel Reimarus, up to William Wrede in the 19th century...

, which shocked the public with its scepticism of the historical accuracy of the Gospels, influenced the secular debate about Shakespeare. In 1848, Samuel Mosheim Schmucker

Samuel Mosheim Schmucker

Samuel Mosheim Schmucker or Smucker was an American historical writer and popular biographer.-Biography:...

endeavoured to rebut Strauss's doubts about the historicity of Christ by applying the same techniques satirically to the records of Shakespeare's life in his Historic Doubts Respecting Shakespeare, Illustrating Infidel Objections Against the Bible. Schmucker, who never doubted that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, unwittingly anticipated and rehearsed many of the later arguments for alternative authorship candidates.

Open dissent and the first alternative candidate

Shakespeare's authorship was first openly questioned in the pages of Joseph C. Hart

Joseph C. Hart

Joseph Coleman Hart was an American writer. He is now best known as the first person to assert in print that William Shakespeare was not the true author of the plays published under his name...

's The Romance of Yachting
The Romance of Yachting
The Romance of Yachting is an 1848 work by Joseph C. Hart published by Harper and Brothers...

(1848). Hart argued that the plays contained evidence that many different authors had worked on them. Four years later Dr. Robert W. Jameson published "Who Wrote Shakespeare" anonymously in the Chambers's Edinburgh Journal
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal was a weekly 16-page magazine started by William Chambers in 1832. The first edition was dated 4 February 1832, and priced at one penny. Topics included history, religion, language, and science...

, expressing similar views. In 1856 Delia Bacon

Delia Bacon

Delia Bacon was an American writer of plays and short stories, a sister of the Congregational minister Leonard Bacon...

's unsigned article "William Shakspeare and His Plays; An Enquiry Concerning Them" appeared in Putnam's Magazine
Putnam's Magazine
Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art was a monthly periodical published by G. P. Putnam's Sons featuring American literature and articles on science, art, and politics...

.

Since 1845, Bacon had theorised that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were actually written by a group under the leadership of Sir Francis Bacon, with Sir Walter Raleigh as the main writer, whose purpose was to inculcate an advanced political and philosophical system for which they themselves could not publicly assume responsibility. Francis Bacon was the first single alternative author proposed in print, by William Henry Smith, in a pamphlet published in September 1856 (Was Lord Bacon the Author of Shakspeare's Plays? A Letter to Lord Ellesmere). The following year Delia Bacon published a book outlining her theory: The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded. Ten years later, Judge Nathaniel Holmes of Kentucky published the 600-page The Authorship of Shakespeare supporting Smith's theory, and the idea began to spread widely. By 1884 the question had produced more than 250 books, and Smith asserted that the war against the Shakespeare hegemony had almost been won by the Baconians

Baconian theory

The Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship holds that Sir Francis Bacon, lawyer, philosopher, essayist and scientist, wrote the plays conventionally attributed to William Shakespeare, and that the historical Shakespeare was merely a front to shield the identity of Bacon, who could not take...

after a 30-year battle. Two years later the Francis Bacon Society was founded in England to promote the theory. The society still survives and publishes a journal, Baconiana, to further its mission.

These arguments against Shakespeare's authorship were answered by academics. In 1857 English critic George Henry Townsend

George Henry Townsend

George Henry Townsend was an English literary compiler and journalist, who wrote several books that are of value in a study of his period....

published William Shakespeare Not an Impostor, criticising what he called the slovenly scholarship, false premises, specious parallel passages, and erroneous conclusions of the earliest proponents of alternative authorship candidates.

Search for proof

In 1853, with the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Delia Bacon travelled to England to search for evidence to support her theories. Instead of performing archival research, she sought to unearth buried manuscripts, and unsuccessfully tried to persuade a caretaker to open Bacon's tomb. She believed she had deciphered instructions in Bacon's letters to look beneath Shakespeare's Stratford gravestone for papers that would prove the works were Bacon's, but after spending several nights in the chancel

Chancel

In church architecture, the chancel is the space around the altar in the sanctuary at the liturgical east end of a traditional Christian church building...

trying to summon the requisite courage, she left without prising up the stone slab.

Ciphers became important to the Baconian theory, as they would later to the advocacy of other authorship candidates, with books such as Ignatius L. Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram (1888) promoting the approach. Dr. Orville Ward Owen

Orville Ward Owen

Dr. Orville Ward Owen was an American physician, and exponent of the Baconian theory of Shakespearean authorship. Owen claimed to have discovered hidden messages contained in the works of Shakespeare/Bacon. He deciphered these using a device he invented called a "cipher wheel"...

constructed a "cipher wheel", a 1,000-foot strip of canvas on which he had pasted the works of Shakespeare and other writers and mounted on two parallel wheels so he could quickly collate pages with key words as he turned them for decryption. In his multi-volume Sir Francis Bacon's Cipher Story (1893), he claimed to have discovered Bacon's autobiography embedded in Shakespeare's plays, including the revelation that Bacon was the secret son of Queen Elizabeth, thus providing more motivation to conceal his authorship from the public.
Perhaps because of Francis Bacon's legal background, both mock and real jury trials figured in attempts to prove claims for Bacon, and later for Oxford. The first mock trial was conducted over 15 months in 1892–93, and the results of the debate were published in the Boston monthly The Arena. Ignatius Donnelly was one of the plaintiff

Plaintiff

A plaintiff , also known as a claimant or complainant, is the term used in some jurisdictions for the party who initiates a lawsuit before a court...

s, while F. J. Furnivall

Frederick James Furnivall

Frederick James Furnivall , one of the co-creators of the Oxford English Dictionary , was an English philologist...

formed part of the defence. The 25-member jury, which included Henry George

Henry George

Henry George was an American writer, politician and political economist, who was the most influential proponent of the land value tax, also known as the "single tax" on land...

, Edmund Gosse

Edmund Gosse

Sir Edmund William Gosse CB was an English poet, author and critic; the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes.-Early life:...

, and Henry Irving

Henry Irving

Sir Henry Irving , born John Henry Brodribb, was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility for season after season at the Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as...

, came down heavily in favour of William Shakespeare. In 1916, Judge Richard Tuthill presided over a real trial in Chicago. A film producer brought an action against a Baconian advocate, George Fabyan

George Fabyan

George Fabyan was a millionaire businessman who founded a private research laboratory. Fabyan's laboratory pioneered modern cryptography, though its initial findings, supporting Fabyan's belief that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, were later disproven by the cryptographers who trained...

. He argued that Fabyan's advocacy of Bacon threatened the profits expected from a forthcoming film about Shakespeare. The judge determined that ciphers identified by Fabyan's analysts proved that Francis Bacon was the author of the Shakespeare canon, awarding Fabyan $5,000 in damages. In the ensuing uproar, Tuthill rescinded his decision, and another judge, Frederick A. Smith, dismissed the case.

In 1907, Owen claimed he had decoded instructions revealing that a box containing proof of Bacon's authorship had been buried in the River Wye

River Wye

The River Wye is the fifth-longest river in the UK and for parts of its length forms part of the border between England and Wales. It is important for nature conservation and recreation.-Description:...

near Chepstow Castle

Chepstow Castle

Chepstow Castle , located in Chepstow, Monmouthshire in Wales, on top of cliffs overlooking the River Wye, is the oldest surviving post-Roman stone fortification in Britain...

on the Duke of Beaufort

Duke of Beaufort

Duke of Beaufort is a title in the Peerage of England. It was created by Charles II in 1682 for Henry Somerset, 3rd Marquess of Worcester, a descendant of Charles Somerset, 1st Earl of Worcester, illegitimate son of Henry Beaufort, 3rd Duke of Somerset, a Lancastrian leader in the Wars of the...

's property. His dredging machinery failed to retrieve any concealed manuscripts. That same year his former assistant, Elizabeth Wells Gallup

Elizabeth Wells Gallup

Elizabeth Wells Gallup was an American educator and exponent of the Baconian theory of Shakespearian authorship....

, financed by George Fabyan, likewise travelled to England. She believed she had decoded a message, by means of a biliteral cipher

Bacon's cipher

Bacon's cipher or the Baconian cipher is a method of steganography devised by Francis Bacon. A message is concealed in the presentation of text, rather than its content.-Cipher details:...

, revealing that Bacon's secret manuscripts were hidden behind panels in Canonbury Tower

Canonbury

Canonbury is a residential district in the London Borough of Islington in the north of London. It is roughly in the area between Essex Road, Upper Street and Cross Street and either side of St Paul's Road....

in Islington

Islington

Islington is a neighbourhood in Greater London, England and forms the central district of the London Borough of Islington. It is a district of Inner London, spanning from Islington High Street to Highbury Fields, encompassing the area around the busy Upper Street...

. None were found. Two years later, American humorist Mark Twain

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...

publicly revealed his long-held anti-Stratfordian belief in Is Shakespeare Dead?
Is Shakespeare Dead?
Is Shakespeare Dead? is a short, semi-autobiographical work by American humorist Mark Twain. It explores the controversy over the authorship of the Shakespearean literary canon via satire, anecdote, and extensive quotation of contemporary authors on the subject.The original publication spans only...

(1909), favouring Bacon as the true author.

In the 1920s Walter Conrad Arensberg became convinced that Bacon had willed the key to his cipher to the Rosicrucians. He thought this society was still active, and that its members communicated with each under the aegis of the Church of England. On the basis of cryptograms he detected in the sixpenny tickets of admission to Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, he deduced that both Bacon and his mother were secretly buried, together with the original manuscripts of Shakespeare's plays, in the Lichfield Chapter house

Chapter house

A chapter house or chapterhouse is a building or room attached to a cathedral or collegiate church in which meetings are held. They can also be found in medieval monasteries....

in Staffordshire

Staffordshire

Staffordshire is a landlocked county in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes, the county is a NUTS 3 region and is one of four counties or unitary districts that comprise the "Shropshire and Staffordshire" NUTS 2 region. Part of the National Forest lies within its borders...

. He unsuccessfully petitioned the Dean of Lichfield to allow him both to photograph and excavate the obscure grave. Maria Bauer was convinced that Bacon's manuscripts had been imported into Jamestown

Jamestown, Virginia

Jamestown was a settlement in the Colony of Virginia. Established by the Virginia Company of London as "James Fort" on May 14, 1607 , it was the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States, following several earlier failed attempts, including the Lost Colony of Roanoke...

, Virginia

Virginia

The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...

in 1653, and could be found in the Bruton Vault at Williamsburg

Williamsburg, Virginia

Williamsburg is an independent city located on the Virginia Peninsula in the Hampton Roads metropolitan area of Virginia, USA. As of the 2010 Census, the city had an estimated population of 14,068. It is bordered by James City County and York County, and is an independent city...

. She gained permission in the late 1930s to excavate, but authorities quickly withdrew her permit. In 1938 Roderick Eagle was allowed to open the tomb of Edmund Spenser to search for proof that Bacon was Shakespeare, but found only some old bones.

Other candidates emerge

Towards the turn of the 20th century other candidates began to receive attention. In 1895 attorney Wilbur Gleason Zeigler published the novel It Was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries, whose premise was that Marlowe did not die in 1593, but rather survived to write Shakespeare's plays. German literary critic Karl Bleibtreu supported the nomination of Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland

Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland

Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland was the son of John Manners, 4th Earl of Rutland.He married Elizabeth Sidney , on 5 March 1599....

in 1907. Rutland's candidacy enjoyed a brief flowering, supported by a number of other authors over the next few years. Anti-Stratfordians unaffiliated to any specific authorship candidate also began to appear. British barrister George Greenwood

George Greenwood

Sir George Greenwood , was a British lawyer, politician, cricketer, animal welfare reformer and Shakespearean scholar.-Life and work:...

sought to disqualify William Shakespeare from the authorship in The Shakespeare Problem Restated (1908), but did not support any alternative authors, thereby encouraging the search for candidates other than Bacon. John M. Robertson published The Baconian Heresy: A Confutation in 1913, refuting the contention that Shakespeare had expert legal knowledge by showing that legalisms pervaded Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. After the First World War, Professor Abel Lefranc

Abel Lefranc

Maurice Jules Abel Lefranc , was a historian of French literature, expert on Rabelais, and the principal advocate of the Derbyite theory of Shakespeare authorship.-Early life:Lefranc was born in Élincourt-Sainte-Marguerite...

, an authority on French and English literature, argued the case for William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby as the author based on biographical evidence he had gleaned from the plays and poems.
With the appearance of J. Thomas Looney

J. Thomas Looney

John Thomas Looney . was an English school teacher who is best known for having originated the Oxfordian theory, which claims that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was the true author of Shakespeare's plays.-Life:Looney was born in South Shields...

's Shakespeare Identified (1920), Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, quickly ascended as the most popular alternative author. Two years later Looney and Greenwood founded the Shakespeare Fellowship, an international organisation to promote discussion and debate on the authorship question, which later changed its mission to propagate the Oxfordian theory. In 1923 Archie Webster published "Was Marlowe the Man?" in The National Review, proposing that Marlowe wrote the works of Shakespeare and that the Sonnets were an autobiographical account of his survival. In 1932 Allardyce Nicoll

Allardyce Nicoll

John Ramsay Allardyce Nicoll was an English literary scholar and teacher.Allardyce Nicoll was born and educated in Glasgow. He became a lecturer at King's College London in 1920 and took the chair of English at East London College John Ramsay Allardyce Nicoll (28 June 1894 – 17 April 1976) was an...

announced the discovery of a manuscript that appeared to establish James Wilmot

James Wilmot

James Wilmot was an English clergyman and scholar from Warwickshire. During his lifetime, he was apparently unknown beyond his immediate circle....

as the earliest proponent of Bacon's authorship, but recent investigations have identified the manuscript as a forgery likely designed to revive Baconian theory in the face of Oxford's ascendancy.

Another authorship candidate emerged in 1943 when writer Alden Brooks

Alden Brooks

Alden Brooks , was an American writer, chiefly remembered for his proposal that Sir Edward Dyer wrote the works of Shakespeare.Brooks was in born in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended schools in both France and England, before graduating from Harvard University in 1905. After teaching at Harvard and as...

, in his Will Shakspere and the Dyer's hand, argued for Sir Edward Dyer

Edward Dyer

Sir Edward Dyer was an English courtier and poet.-Life:The son of Sir Thomas Dyer, Kt., he was born at Sharpham Park, Glastonbury, Somerset. He was educated, according to Anthony Wood, either at Balliol College, Oxford or at Broadgates Hall , and left after taking a degree...

. Six years earlier Brooks had dismissed Shakespeare as the playwright by proposing that his role in the deception was to act as an Elizabethan "play broker", broker

Broker

A broker is a party that arranges transactions between a buyer and a seller, and gets a commission when the deal is executed. A broker who also acts as a seller or as a buyer becomes a principal party to the deal...

ing the plays and poems on behalf of his various principals, the real authors. This view, of Shakespeare as a commercial go-between, was later adapted by Oxfordians. After the Second World War, Oxfordism and anti-Stratfordism declined in popularity and visibility. Copious archival research had failed to confirm Oxford or anyone else as the true author, and publishers lost interest in books advancing the same theories based on alleged circumstantial evidence. To bridge the evidentiary gap, both Oxfordians and Baconians began to argue that hidden clues and allusions in the Shakespeare canon had been placed there by their candidate for the benefit of future researchers.

To try to revive flagging interest in Oxford, in 1952 Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn Sr.

Charlton Greenwood Ogburn

Charlton Greenwood Ogburn was a practicing lawyer who was drawn into the Shakespearean authorship question when Charles Wisner Barrell approached him for assistance in his lawsuit against Folger Shakespeare Library Director Giles Dawson for libel in response to comments made after Barrell...

published the 1,300-page This Star of England, now regarded as a classic Oxfordian text. They proposed that the "fair youth" of the sonnets was Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton

Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton

Henry Wriothesley , 3rd Earl of Southampton , was the second son of Henry Wriothesley, 2nd Earl of Southampton, and his wife Mary Browne, Countess of Southampton, daughter of the 1st Viscount Montagu...

, the offspring of a love affair between Oxford and the Queen, and that the "Shakespeare" plays were written by Oxford to memorialise the passion of that affair. This became known as the "Prince Tudor theory

Prince Tudor theory

The Prince Tudor theory is a variant of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, which asserts that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford was the true author of the works published under the name of William Shakespeare...

", which postulates that the Queen's illicit offspring and his father's authorship of the Shakespeare canon were covered up as an Elizabethan state secret. The Ogburns found many parallels between Oxford's life and the works, particularly in Hamlet
Hamlet
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...

, which they characterised as "straight biography". A brief upsurge of enthusiasm ensued, resulting in the establishment of the Shakespeare Oxford Society in the US in 1957.

In 1955 Broadway press agent Calvin Hoffman

Calvin Hoffman

Calvin Hoffman, born Leo Hochman , was an American theater press agent and writer who popularized the notion that playwright Christopher Marlowe was the actual author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare...

revived the Marlovian theory with the publication of The Murder of the Man Who Was "Shakespeare". The next year he went to England to search for documentary evidence about Marlowe that he thought might be buried in his literary patron Sir Thomas Walsingham

Thomas Walsingham (literary patron)

Sir Thomas Walsingham was a courtier to Queen Elizabeth I and literary patron to such poets as Thomas Watson, Thomas Nashe, George Chapman and Christopher Marlowe. He was related to Elizabeth's spymaster Francis Walsingham and the employer of Marlowe's murderer Ingram Frizer...

's tomb. Nothing was found.

A series of critical academic books and articles, however, held in check any appreciable growth of anti-Stratfordism, as academics attacked its methodology as unscholarly and the conclusions as ridiculous. American cryptologists

Cryptography

Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...

William

William F. Friedman

William Frederick Friedman was a US Army cryptographer who ran the research division of the Army's Signals Intelligence Service in the 1930s, and parts of its follow-on services into the 1950s...

and Elizebeth Friedman

Elizebeth Friedman

Elizebeth Smith Friedman was a cryptanalyst and author, and a pioneer in U.S. cryptography. The special spelling of her name is attributed to her mother, who disliked the prospect of Elizebeth ever being called "Eliza." She has been dubbed "America's first female cryptanalyst".Although she is...

won the Folger Shakespeare Library

Folger Shakespeare Library

The Folger Shakespeare Library is an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., in the United States. It has the world's largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare materials from the early modern period...

Literary Prize in 1955 for a study of the arguments that the works of Shakespeare contain hidden ciphers. The study disproved all claims that the works contain ciphers, and was condensed and published as The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined (1957). Soon after, four major works were issued surveying the history of the anti-Stratfordian phenomenon from a mainstream perspective: The Poacher from Stratford (1958), by Frank Wadsworth, Shakespeare and His Betters (1958), by Reginald Churchill, The Shakespeare Claimants (1962), by H. N. Gibson, and Shakespeare and His Rivals: A Casebook on the Authorship Controversy (1962), by George L. McMichael and Edgar M. Glenn. In 1959 the American Bar Association Journal
ABA Journal
The ABA Journal is a monthly legal trade magazine and the flagship publication of the American Bar Association. It claims to be "read by half of the nation's 1 million lawyers every month"...

published a series of articles and letters on the authorship controversy, later anthologised as Shakespeare Cross-Examination (1961). In 1968 the newsletter of The Shakespeare Oxford Society reported that "the missionary or evangelical spirit of most of our members seems to be at a low ebb, dormant, or non-existent". In 1974, membership in the society stood at 80.

Authorship in the mainstream media

Freelance writer Charlton Ogburn Jr.

Charlton Ogburn

Charlton Ogburn, Jr. was a journalist and author of memoirs and non-fiction works. He was also a well-known advocate of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship...

, elected president of The Shakespeare Oxford Society in 1976, promptly began a campaign to bypass the academic establishment; he believed it to be an "entrenched authority" that aimed to "outlaw and silence dissent in a supposedly free society". He proposed fighting for public recognition by portraying Oxford as a candidate on equal footing with Shakespeare. In 1985 Ogburn published his 900-page The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Myth and the Reality, and by framing the issue as one of fairness in the atmosphere of conspiracy that permeated America after Watergate, he used the media to circumnavigate academia

Academia

Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...

and appeal directly to the public. Ogburn's efforts secured Oxford the place as the most popular alternative candidate. He also kick-started the modern revival of the Oxfordian movement by adopting a policy of seeking publicity through moot court trials, media debates, television, and later the Internet, including Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

.
Ogburn believed that academics were best challenged by recourse to law, and on 25 September 1987 three justices

Judge

A judge is a person who presides over court proceedings, either alone or as part of a panel of judges. The powers, functions, method of appointment, discipline, and training of judges vary widely across different jurisdictions. The judge is supposed to conduct the trial impartially and in an open...

of the Supreme Court of the United States

Supreme Court of the United States

The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...

convened a one-day moot court

Moot court

A moot court is an extracurricular activity at many law schools in which participants take part in simulated court proceedings, usually to include drafting briefs and participating in oral argument. The term derives from Anglo Saxon times, when a moot was a gathering of prominent men in a...

at the Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church

United Methodist Church

The United Methodist Church is a Methodist Christian denomination which is both mainline Protestant and evangelical. Founded in 1968 by the union of The Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church, the UMC traces its roots back to the revival movement of John and Charles Wesley...

, to hear the Oxfordian case. The trial was structured so that literary experts would not be represented, but the burden of proof was on the Oxfordians. The justices determined that the case was based on a conspiracy theory, and that the reasons given for this conspiracy were both incoherent and unpersuasive. Although Ogburn took the verdict as a "clear defeat", Oxfordian columnist Joseph Sobran

Joseph Sobran

Michael Joseph Sobran, Jr. was an American journalist and writer, formerly with National Review and a syndicated columnist, known as Joe Sobran. Pundit Pat Buchanan called Sobran "perhaps the finest columnist of our generation", although Sobran was fired from National Review by his one-time mentor...

thought the trial had effectively dismissed any other Shakespeare authorship contender from the public mind and provided legitimacy for Oxford. A retrial was organised the next year in the United Kingdom to potentially reverse the decision. Presided over by three Law Lords, the court was held in the Inner Temple

Inner Temple

The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, commonly known as Inner Temple, is one of the four Inns of Court in London. To be called to the Bar and practise as a barrister in England and Wales, an individual must belong to one of these Inns...

in London on 26 November 1988. On this occasion Shakespearean scholars argued their case, and the outcome confirmed the American verdict.

Due in part to the rising visibility of the authorship question, media coverage of the controversy increased, with many outlets focusing on the Oxfordian

Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship

theory. In 1989 the Public Broadcasting Service

Public Broadcasting Service

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

television show Frontline broadcast "The Shakespeare Mystery", exposing the interpretation of Oxford-as-Shakespeare to more than 3.5 million viewers in the US alone. This was followed in 1992 by a three-hour Frontline teleconference, "Uncovering Shakespeare: an Update", moderated by William F. Buckley, Jr.

William F. Buckley, Jr.

William Frank Buckley, Jr. was an American conservative author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. His writing was noted for...

In 1991 The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...

published a debate between Tom Bethell, presenting the case for Oxford, and Irvin Leigh Matus

Irvin Leigh Matus

Irvin Leigh Matus was an independent scholar, autodidact and author. He is best known as an authority on Shakespeare, but also wrote about aspects of Brooklyn's history such as the Vitagraph Studios, and developed a method of modelling baseball statistics...

, presenting the case for Shakespeare. A similar print debate took place in 1999 in Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...

under the title "The Ghost of Shakespeare". Beginning in the 1990s Oxfordians and other anti-Stratfordians increasingly turned to the Internet to promulgate their theories, including creating several articles on Wikipedia about the candidates and the arguments, to such an extent that a survey of the field in 2010 judged that its presence on Wikipedia "puts to shame anything that ever appeared in standard resources".

On 14 April 2007 the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition issued an internet petition

Internet petition

An Internet petition is a form of petition posted on a website. Visitors to the website in question can add their email addresses or names, and after enough "signatures" have been collected, the resulting letter may be delivered to the subject of the petition, usually via e-mail.-Pros and cons:The...

, the "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About the Identity of William Shakespeare", coinciding with Brunel University

Brunel University

Brunel University is a public research university located in Uxbridge, London, United Kingdom. The university is named after the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel....

's announcement of a one-year Master of Arts programme in Shakespeare authorship studies. The coalition intends to enlist broad public support so that by 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, the academic Shakespeare establishment will be forced to acknowledge that legitimate grounds for doubting Shakespeare's authorship exist. More than 1,200 signatures were collected by the end of 2007, and the number of signatures had increased to 2,087, including those of 373 current or former academics. On 22 April 2007, The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

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

In 2010 James S. Shapiro

James S. Shapiro

James S. Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University who specialises in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period...

surveyed the authorship question in Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, marking the first time a recognised Shakespeare scholar has devoted a book to the topic. Approaching the subject sociologically, Shapiro found its origins to be grounded in a vein of traditional scholarship going back to Edmond Malone

Edmond Malone

Edmond Malone was an Irish Shakespearean scholar and editor of the works of William Shakespeare.Assured of an income after the death of his father in 1774, Malone was able to give up his law practice for at first political and then more congenial literary pursuits. He went to London, where he...

, and criticised academia for ignoring the topic, which was, he argued, tantamount to surrendering the field to anti-Stratfordians. In September 2011, Anonymous
Anonymous (film)
Anonymous is a political thriller and historical drama which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11, 2011. Directed by Roland Emmerich and written by John Orloff, the movie is a fictionalized version of the life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, an Elizabethan...

, a feature film directed by Roland Emmerich

Roland Emmerich

Roland Emmerich is a German film director, screenwriter, and producer.His films, most of which are Hollywood productions filmed in English, have grossed more than $3 billion worldwide, more than those of any other European director...

based on the "Prince Tudor"

Prince Tudor theory

variant of the Oxfordian theory, premiered in Toronto. It portrays Oxford as the illegitimate son and lover of Queen Elizabeth, with whom he sires his own half-brother, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. In the film, Shakespeare, an unscrupulous bit player, becomes Oxford’s secret frontman for Oxford's poems and plays, which are interpreted as seditious challenges to the monarchy.

Alternative candidates

More than 70 historical figures have been nominated at one time or another as the true author of the Shakespeare canon, some less seriously than others. However, only four have attracted a significant number of followers.

Sir Francis Bacon

The leading candidate of the 19th century was one of the great intellectual figures of Jacobean England, Sir Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon

, a lawyer, philosopher, essayist and scientist. Bacon's candidacy relies upon historical and literary conjectures, as well as alleged cryptographical revelations.

William Henry Smith was the first to propose Bacon as the author in 1856. He compared passages such as Bacon's "Poetry is nothing else but feigned history" with Shakespeare's "The truest poetry is the most feigning" (As You Like It
As You Like It
As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 or early 1600 and first published in the folio of 1623. The play's first performance is uncertain, though a performance at Wilton House in 1603 has been suggested as a possibility...

, 3.3.19–20), and Bacon's "He wished him not to shut the gate of your Majesty's mercy" with Shakespeare's "The gates of mercy shall be all shut up" (Henry V
Henry V (play)
Henry V is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed to be written in approximately 1599. Its full titles are The Cronicle History of Henry the Fifth and The Life of Henry the Fifth...

, 3.3.10). Shortly afterwards Delia Bacon argued that there were hidden political meanings in the plays and parallels between those ideas and Bacon's known works. She proposed him as the leader of a group of disaffected philosopher-politicians who tried to promote republican ideas to counter the despotism of the Tudor-Stuart monarchies through the medium of the public stage. Later Bacon supporters found similarities between a great number of specific phrases and aphorisms from the plays and those written by Bacon in his waste book

Waste book

A waste book was one of the books traditionally used in bookkeeping. It comprised a daily diary of all transactions in chronological order. It differs from a daybook in that only a single waste book is kept, rather than a separate daybook for each of several categories...

, the Promus. In 1883 Mrs. Henry Pott edited Bacon's Promus and found 4,400 parallels of thought or expression between Shakespeare and Bacon.

In a letter addressed to John Davies

John Davies of Hereford

John Davies of Hereford was a writing-master and an Anglo-Welsh poet. He is usually known as John Davies of Hereford in order to distinguish him from others of the same name....

, Bacon closes "so desireing you to bee good to concealed poets", which according to his supporters is self-referential. Baconians argue that while Bacon outlined both a scientific and moral philosophy in The Advancement of Learning
The Advancement of Learning
right|thumbnail|Title pageThe Advancement of Learning is a 1605 book by Francis Bacon.-Darwin:...

(1605), only the first part was published under his name during his lifetime. They say that his moral philosophy, including a revolutionary politico-philosophic system of government, was concealed in the Shakespeare plays because of its threat to the monarchy.

Baconians suggest that the great number of legal allusions in the Shakespeare canon demonstrate the author's expertise in the law. Bacon became Queen's Counsel

Queen's Counsel

Queen's Counsel , known as King's Counsel during the reign of a male sovereign, are lawyers appointed by letters patent to be one of Her [or His] Majesty's Counsel learned in the law...

in 1596 and was appointed Attorney General in 1613. Bacon also paid for and helped write speeches for a number of entertainments, including masque

Masque

The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment which flourished in 16th and early 17th century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio...

s and dumbshow

Dumbshow

Dumbshow, also dumb show or dumb-show, is a traditional term for pantomime in drama, actions presented by actors onstage without spoken dialogue. It is similar to the masque...

s, although he is not known to have authored a play. His only attributed verse consists of seven metrical psalter

Metrical psalter

A metrical psalter is a kind of Bible translation: a book containing a metrical translation of all or part of the Book of Psalms in vernacular poetry, meant to be sung as hymns in a church. Some metrical psalters include melodies or even harmonizations...

s, following Sternhold and Hopkins.

Since Bacon was knowledgeable about ciphers, early Baconians suspected that he left his signature encrypted in the Shakespeare canon. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries many Baconians claimed to have discovered ciphers throughout the works supporting Bacon as the true author. In 1881, Mrs. C. F. Ashwood Windle claimed she had found carefully worked-out jingles in each play that identified Bacon as the author. This sparked a cipher craze, and probative cryptograms were identified in the works by Ignatius Donnelly, Orville Ward Owen, Elizabeth Wells Gallup

Elizabeth Wells Gallup

Elizabeth Wells Gallup was an American educator and exponent of the Baconian theory of Shakespearian authorship....

, and Dr. Isaac Hull Platt. Platt discovered that the Latin word honorificabilitudinitatibus
Honorificabilitudinitatibus
Honorificabilitudinitatibus is the dative and ablative plural of the mediæval Latin word honorificabilitudinitas, which can be translated as "the state of being able to achieve honours". It is mentioned by the character Costard in Act V, Scene I of William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost...

, found in Love's Labour's Lost, can be read as an anagram, yielding Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi ("These plays, the offspring of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world.").

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford

and Lord Great Chamberlain

Lord Great Chamberlain

The Lord Great Chamberlain of England is the sixth of the Great Officers of State, ranking beneath the Lord Privy Seal and above the Lord High Constable...

of England, followed his grandfather and father in patronising companies of players and musicians. Oxford was an important courtier poet, praised as such and named as a playwright by George Puttenham

George Puttenham

George Puttenham was a sixteenth-century English writer, literary critic, and notorious rake. He is generally considered to be the author of the enormously influential handbook on poetry and rhetoric, The Arte of English Poesie ....

and Francis Meres, who included him in a list of the "best for comedy amongst us". Examples of poetry from his hand survive, but none of his theatrical works.

The case for Oxford relies on historical inferences, literary parallels, and the belief that the plots and characters portrayed in the plays reflect his personal experiences. Schoolteacher J. Thomas Looney was the first to lay out a comprehensive case for Oxford's authorship, though Delia Bacon named him among the group of writers who she thought collectively wrote the works of Shakespeare under Bacon's direction. Looney identified personality characteristics in Shakespeare's works—especially Hamlet—that painted the author as an eccentric aristocratic poet, a drama and sporting enthusiast with a classical education who had travelled to Italy. He discerned putatively close affinities between the poetry of Oxford and that of Shakespeare in the use of motifs and subjects, phrasing, and rhetorical devices that enabled him to identify Oxford as the true author. After Looney's Shakespeare Identified was published in 1920, Oxford rapidly overtook Bacon to become the most popular alternative candidate, and remains so to this day.

According to Oxfordians, Shakespeare's works contain correspondences to Oxford's life and are read as coded autobiography; literal readings of certain sonnets are taken to refer to incidents in Oxford's life. Ben Jonson's characterisation of Shakespeare as an unlearned poet who rose to be "The Swan of Avon" is taken to allude to the erudite Oxford, who, three decades earlier, had some property near the River Avon. Reference to Shakespeare as an English Terence

Terence

is construed to mean that he was a front man, because of an ancient rumour that the aristocrats Scipio Africanus

Scipio Africanus

Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus , also known as Scipio Africanus and Scipio the Elder, was a general in the Second Punic War and statesman of the Roman Republic...

and Gaius Laelius

Gaius Laelius

Gaius Laelius — also Caius Lelius — general and statesman, was a friend of Scipio Africanus, whom he accompanied on his Iberian campaign...

had assisted Terence in writing his plays. Oxford, further, died in 1604, before ten of the plays appeared. Oxfordians either date these works earlier or suggest that unfinished works were completed by other playwrights and released after his death. They argue that the publication of new plays almost ceased around the time of Oxford's death and that the dedication to the 1609 sonnets implies that the author is dead.

No documentary evidence connecting Oxford to the authorship of the works has been found, but purported codes and ciphers discovered in the works have been used to support the theory. For example, more than 1,700 instances of the anagram "E. Vere" are embedded in the Shakespeare canon in the words "ever", "every", and "never"; these same veiled signatures have been found by Oxfordian George Frisbee in the works of Marlowe, George Gascoigne

George Gascoigne

George Gascoigne was an English poet, soldier, artist, and unsuccessful courtier. He is considered the most important poet of the early Elizabethan era, following Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and leading to the emergence of Philip Sidney...

, Sir John Harrington, Edmund Spenser, and others, identifying those authors as further pseudonyms of Oxford. A device from Henry Peacham

Henry Peacham

Henry Peacham is the name shared by two English Renaissance writers who were father and son.The elder Henry Peacham was an English curate, best known for his treatise on rhetoric titled The Garden of Eloquence first published in 1577....

's Minerva Britanna (1612) depicting a hand appearing from behind a curtain and writing the Latin motto MENTE VIDEBOR ("By the mind I shall be seen") was first used to support Bacon's candidacy, but is seen by Oxfordians as a clue to Oxford's hidden authorship. By interpreting the final full stop as the beginning of an "I", the phrase becomes an anagram of TIBI NOM. DE VERE ("Thy Name is De Vere").

Oxford's purported use of the "Shakespeare" pen name is attributed to the stigma of print

Stigma of print

, a convention that aristocratic authors could not take credit for writing plays for the public stage. Another motivation given is the politically explosive "Prince Tudor theory

Prince Tudor theory

" that the youthful Oxford was Queen Elizabeth's lover; according to this theory, Oxford dedicated Venus and Adonis
Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare poem)
Venus and Adonis is a poem by William Shakespeare, written in 1592–1593, with a plot based on passages from Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is a complex, kaleidoscopic work, using constantly shifting tone and perspective to present contrasting views of the nature of love.-Publication:Venus and Adonis was...

, The Rape of Lucrece
The Rape of Lucrece
The Rape of Lucrece is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare about the legendary Lucretia. In his previous narrative poem, Venus and Adonis , Shakespeare had included a dedicatory letter to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which he promised to write a "graver work"...

, and the Sonnets to their son, England's rightful Tudor Prince

Tudor dynasty

The Tudor dynasty or House of Tudor was a European royal house of Welsh origin that ruled the Kingdom of England and its realms, including the Lordship of Ireland, later the Kingdom of Ireland, from 1485 until 1603. Its first monarch was Henry Tudor, a descendant through his mother of a legitimised...

Henry Wriothesley, who was raised as the 3rd Earl of Southampton. This theory has deeply divided Oxfordians, and even more so its variation, "Prince Tudor Part II", which states that not only was Southampton Oxford's and Elizabeth's bastard, he was also Oxford's half-brother because Oxford himself was the Queen's son. This theory suggests that at age 14 Elizabeth was made pregnant by her guardian Thomas Seymour

Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley

Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley, KG was an English politician.Thomas spent his childhood in Wulfhall, outside Savernake Forest, in Wiltshire. Historian David Starkey describes Thomas thus: 'tall, well-built and with a dashing beard and auburn hair, he was irresistible to women'...

, and their child was placed with the House of Oxford.

Christopher Marlowe

Poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe

was born into the same social class as Shakespeare—his father was a cobbler, Shakespeare's a glove-maker. Marlowe was the older by only two months, but spent six and a half years at Cambridge University. He pioneered the use of blank verse

Blank verse

Blank verse is poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the sixteenth century" and Paul Fussell has claimed that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse."The first...

in Elizabethan drama, and his works are widely accepted as having greatly influenced those of Shakespeare. Of his seven plays, all but one or two were first performed before 1593.

The Marlovian theory argues that Marlowe's documented death on 30 May 1593 was faked. Thomas Walsingham

Thomas Walsingham (literary patron)

and others are supposed to have arranged the faked death, the main purpose of which was to allow Marlowe to escape trial and almost certain execution on charges of subversive atheism

Atheism

Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...

. The theory then argues that Shakespeare was chosen as the front behind whom Marlowe would continue writing his highly successful plays. These claims are founded on inferences derived from the circumstances of his apparent death, stylistic similarities between the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, and hidden meanings found in the works and associated texts.

Marlovians note that, despite Marlowe and Shakespeare being almost exactly the same age, the first work linked to the name William Shakespeare—Venus and Adonis—was on sale, with his name signed to the dedication, just 13 days after Marlowe's reported death, having been registered with the Stationers' Company on 18 April 1593 with no named author. Lists of verbal correspondences between the two canons have also been compiled.

Marlowe was initially suggested as a candidate in 1884, as a member of a group of authors. He was first proposed as the sole author in 1895. His candidacy was revived by Calvin Hoffman in 1955 and is now the nearest rival to Oxford's.

William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby

, was first proposed as a candidate in 1891 by James Greenstreet and later supported by Abel Lefranc and others. Greenstreet discovered that a Jesuit spy, George Fenner, reported in 1599 that Derby "is busye in penning commodyes for the common players." That same year Derby was recorded as financing one of London's two children's drama companies, Paul's Boys

Children of Paul's

The Children of Paul's was the name of a troupe of boy actors in Elizabethan and Jacobean London. Along with the Children of the Chapel, the Children of Paul's were the most important of the companies of boy players that constituted a distinctive feature of English Renaissance theatre.St...

; he also had his own company, Derby's Men, which played multiple times at court in 1600 and 1601. Derby was born three years before Shakespeare and died in 1642, so his lifespan fits the consensus dating of the works. His initials were W. S., and he was known to sign himself "Will", which qualified him to write the punning "Will" sonnets.

Derby travelled in continental Europe in 1582, visiting France and possibly Navarre

Kingdom of Navarre

The Kingdom of Navarre , originally the Kingdom of Pamplona, was a European kingdom which occupied lands on either side of the Pyrenees alongside the Atlantic Ocean....

. Love's Labour's Lost is set in Navarre and the play may be based on events that happened there between 1578 and 1584. Derby married Elizabeth de Vere

Elizabeth de Vere, Countess of Derby

Elizabeth de Vere, Countess of Derby, Lord of Mann was an English noblewoman and the eldest daughter of Elizabethan courtier, poet, and playwright Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford....

, whose maternal grandfather was William Cecil

William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley

William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley , KG was an English statesman, the chief advisor of Queen Elizabeth I for most of her reign, twice Secretary of State and Lord High Treasurer from 1572...

, thought by some critics to be the basis of the character of Polonius in Hamlet. Derby was associated with William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke

William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke

William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, KG, PC was the son of Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke and his third wife Mary Sidney. Chancellor of the University of Oxford, he founded Pembroke College, Oxford with King James. He was warden of the Forest of Dean, and constable of St Briavels from 1608...

and his brother Philip Herbert

Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke

Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke and 1st Earl of Montgomery KG was an English courtier and politician active during the reigns of James I and Charles I...

, Earl of Montgomery and later 4th Earl of Pembroke, the "Incomparable Pair" to whom William Shakespeare's First Folio is dedicated. When Derby released his estates to his son James

James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby

James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby KG was a supporter of the Royalist cause in the English Civil War.Born at Knowsley, he is sometimes styled the Great Earl of Derby, eldest son of William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby and Lady Elizabeth de Vere. During his father's life he was known as Lord Strange...

around 1628–29, he named Pembroke and Montgomery as trustees. Derby's older brother, Ferdinando Stanley, 5th Earl of Derby

Ferdinando Stanley, 5th Earl of Derby

Ferdinando Stanley, 5th Earl of Derby was the son of Henry Stanley, 4th Earl of Derby and Lady Margaret Clifford. According to the will of Henry VIII, his mother was heiress presumptive of Elizabeth I of England from 1578 to her own death in 1596...

, formed a group of players, the Lord Strange's Men

Lord Strange's Men

Lord Strange's Men was an Elizabethan playing company, comprising retainers of the household of Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange . They are best known in their final phase of activity in the late 1580s and early 1590s...

, some of whose members eventually joined the King's Men, one of the companies most associated with Shakespeare.

Footnotes

The UK and US editions of differ significantly in pagination. The citations to the book used in this article list the UK page numbers first, followed by the page numbers of the US edition in parentheses.

External links

The Shakespeare Authorship Page—a collection of information by David Kathman and Terry Ross
All Things Shakespeare—essays and information by Irvin Leigh Matus
Irvin Leigh Matus
Irvin Leigh Matus was an independent scholar, autodidact and author. He is best known as an authority on Shakespeare, but also wrote about aspects of Brooklyn's history such as the Vitagraph Studios, and developed a method of modelling baseball statistics...
Shakespeare Authorship Pages—a collection of links to information and research by Alan H. Nelson
The Shakespeare Authorship Trust—an organisation dedicated to promoting the Shakespeare authorship question

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.