The Shakespeare authorship question is the argument that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works attributed to him. Anti-Stratfordians—a collective term for adherents of the various alternative-authorship theories—believe that Shakespeare of Stratford was a front to shield the identity of the real author or authors, who for some reason—usually social rank, state security, or gender—did not want or could not accept public credit.: Anti-Stratfordian' is the collective name for the belief that someone other than the man from Stratford wrote the plays commonly attributed to him."; . Although the idea has attracted much public interest,. all but a few Shakespeare scholars and literary historians consider it a fringe theory and for the most part acknowledge it only to rebut or disparage the claims.: "...antiStratfordism has remained a fringe belief system"; ; : "To ask me about the authorship question ... is like asking a palaeontologist to debate a creationist's account of the fossil record."; : "I do not know of a single professor of the 1,300-member Shakespeare Association of America who questions the identity of Shakespeare ... antagonism to the authorship debate from within the profession is so great that it would be as difficult for a professed Oxfordian to be hired in the first place, much less gain tenure..."; : "I have never met anyone in an academic position like mine, in the Establishment, who entertained the slightest doubt as to Shakespeare's authorship of the general body of plays attributed to him."; : "Shakespeareans sometimes take the position that to even engage the Oxfordian hypothesis is to give it a countenance it does not warrant."; : "There is, it should be noted, no academic Shakespearian of any standing who goes along with the Oxfordian theory."; : "...most of the great Shakespearean scholars are to be found in the Stratfordian camp..."
Shakespeare's authorship was first questioned in the middle of the 19th century,; ; ; ; . when adulation of Shakespeare as the greatest writer of all time had become widespread.: By 1840, admiration for Shakespeare throughout Europe had become such that Thomas Carlyle "could say without hyperbole" that Shakspeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of literature. Some aspects of Shakespeare's life, particularly his humble origins and relative obscurity while he was alive, seemed incompatible with his poetic eminence and reputation for genius,. which aroused 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 80 authorship candidates have been proposed,. the most popular being Sir Francis Bacon; Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford; Christopher Marlowe; and William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby.; .
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 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 observers, however, have been more impressed by the anti-Stratfordians' dogged immunity to documentary evidence"; : "the challenger would still need to produce evidence in favour of another author. There is no such evidence."; : "...those who believe that other authors were responsible for the canon as a whole ... have been forced to invoke elaborate conspiracy theories."; : "Paradoxically, the skeptics invariably substitute for the easily explained lack of evidence concerning William Shakespeare, the more troublesome picture of a vast conspiracy of silence about the 'real author', with a total lack of historical evidence for the existence of this 'real author' explained on the grounds of a secret pact"; : "Some suppose that only Shakespeare and the real author were in the know. At the other extreme are those who believe that it was an open secret". 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 evident in the works.: "These two notions—that the Shakespeare canon represented the highest achievement of human culture, while William Shakespeare was a completely uneducated rustic—combined to persuade Delia Bacon and her successors that the Folio's title page and preliminaries could only be part of a fabulously elaborate charade orchestrated by some more elevated personage, and they accordingly misread the distinctive literary traces of Shakespeare's solid Elizabethan grammar-school education visible throughout the volume as evidence that the 'real' author had attended Oxford or Cambridge." Those Shakespeare scholars who have responded to such claims hold that biographical interpretations of literature are unreliable in attributing authorship: "Their [Oxfordians'] favorite code is the hidden personal allusion ... But this method is in essence no different from the cryptogram, since Shakespeare's range of characters and plots, both familial and political, is so vast that it would be possible to find in the plays 'self-portraits' of, once more, anybody one cares to think of."; : "It has more than once been claimed that the combination of 'biographical-fit' and cryptographical arguments could be used to establish a case for almost any individual ... The very fact that their application has produced so many rival claimants demonstrates their unreliability." ; : "in voicing dissatisfaction over the apparent lack of continuity between the certain facts of Shakespeare's life and the spirit of his literary output, anti-Stratfordians adopt the very Modernist assumption that an author's work must reflect his or her life. Neither Shakespeare nor his fellow Elizabethan writers operated under this assumption."; : "...deriving an idea of an author from his or her works is always problematic, particularly in a multi-vocal genre like drama, since it crucially underestimates the heterogeneous influences and imaginative reaches of creative writing." and that the convergence of documentary evidence used to support Shakespeare's authorship—title pages, testimony by other contemporary poets and historians, and official records—is the same as that used for all other authorial attributions of his era.: "The reasons we have for believing that William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays and poems are the same as the reasons we have for believing any other historical event ... the historical evidence says that William Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems."; ; : "Apart from the First Folio, the documentary evidence for William Shakespeare is the same as we get for other writers of the period..." No such direct evidence exists for any other candidate,: "The problem that confronts all such attempts is that they have to dispose of the many testimonies from Will the player's own time that he was regarded as the author of the plays and the absence of any clear contravening public claims of the same nature for any of the other favoured candidates."; . and Shakespeare's authorship was questioned neither during his lifetime nor for centuries after his death.: "No one in Shakespeare's lifetime or the first two hundred years after his death expressed the slightest doubt about his authorship."; : "...no suspicions regarding Shakespeare's authorship (except for a few mainly humorous comments) were expressed until the middle of the nineteenth century".
Despite the scholarly consensus,; : "The idea that William Shakespeare's authorship of his plays and poems is a matter of conjecture and the idea that the 'authorship controversy' be taught in the classroom are the exact equivalent of current arguments that 'intelligent design' be taught alongside evolution. In both cases an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on a serious assessment of hard evidence, is challenged by passionately held fantasies whose adherents demand equal time." a small: "Nevertheless, the skeptics who question Shakespeare's authorship are relatively few in number, and they do not speak for the majority of academic and literary professionals." but highly visible and diverse assortment of supporters, including prominent public figures,. have questioned the conventional attribution.; . They work for acknowledgement of the authorship question as a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry and for acceptance of one or another of the various authorship candidates.; .
Case against Shakespeare's authorship Most anti-Stratfordians suggest that the Shakespeare canon exhibits broad learning, knowledge of foreign languages and geography, and familiarity with Elizabethan and Jacobean court and politics; therefore, no one but a highly educated individual or court insider could have written it.; . Apart from literary references, critical commentary and acting notices, the available data regarding Shakespeare's life consist of mundane personal details such as vital records of his baptism, marriage and death, tax records, lawsuits to recover debts, and real estate transactions. In addition, no document attests that he received an education or owned any books.: "Not a trace of his library was found. No books, no manuscripts, no letters, no diaries. The desire to get close to Shakespeare was unrequited, the vacuum palpable." No personal letters or literary manuscripts certainly written by Shakespeare of Stratford survive. To sceptics, these gaps in the record suggest the profile of a person who differs markedly from the playwright and poet.; ; ; : "Fuelled by scepticism that the plays could have been written by a working man from a provincial town with no record of university education, foreign travel, legal studies or court preferment, the controversialists proposed instead a sequence of mainly aristocratic alternative authors whose philosophically or politically occult meanings, along with their own true identity, had to be hidden in codes, cryptograms and runic obscurity." Some prominent public figures, including Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, John Paul Stevens, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and Charlie Chaplin, 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.: "The Shakespeare authorship debate is a classic instance of a controversy that draws its very breath from a fundamental disagreement over the nature of admissible evidence."; ; . Anti-Stratfordians rely on what has been called a "rhetoric of accumulation",. or what they designate as circumstantial evidence: 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 literary and hidden allusions and cryptographic codes in works by contemporaries and in Shakespeare's own works.; .