History of the Shakespeare authorship question

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

The scholarly consensus regarding the emergence of doubts about Shakespeare's authorship is that the traditional attribution was first challenged in the middle of the 19th century. To that date, there is no evidence that his authorship was ever questioned. This conclusion is not accepted, however, by proponents of an alternative author, who discern veiled allusions in contemporary documents they construe as evidence that the works attributed to him were written by someone else, and that certain early 18th century satirical and allegorical tracts likewise hint that the Shakespearean canon was written by someone else.

Throughout the 18th century, Shakespeare was described as a transcendent genius and by the beginning of the 19th century Bardolatry was in full swing. Uneasiness about the difference between Shakespeare's godlike reputation and the humdrum facts of his biography began to emerge in the 19th century.

In 1853, with help from Emerson, Delia Bacon, an American teacher and writer, travelled to Britain to research her belief that Shakespeare's works were written to communicate the advanced political and philosophical ideas of Francis Bacon (no relation). Later writers such as Ignatius Donnelly portrayed Francis Bacon as the sole author.

In 1918 the advocacy of Professor Abel Lefranc, a renowned authority on Renaissance literature, put William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby in a prominent position as a candidate, based on biographical evidence found in the plays and poems In 1920, an English school-teacher, John Thomas Looney, published Shakespeare Identified, proposing a new candidate for the authorship in Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. This theory gained many notable advocates, including Sigmund Freud. By the early 20th century, the Bacon movement faded resulting in increased interest in Stanley and Oxford. In 1923, Archie Webster wrote the first serious essay on the candidacy of playwright Christopher Marlowe. Since the publication of Charlton Ogburn's The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Myth and the Reality in 1984, the Oxfordian theory, boosted in part by the advocacy of several Supreme Court justices, high-profile theatre professionals, and a limited number of academics, has become the most popular alternative authorship theory.

The rise of bardolatry in the 17th and 18th centuries
Upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II reopened the theatres, and two patent companies—the King's Company and the Duke's Company—were established. 18 years of closed theatres had resulted in the loss of playwrighting as a profession, and so the existing theatrical repertoire—the works of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher—which had been preserved by folio publication, were divided between the two companies and revived for the stage. Sir William Davenant, reputedly Shakespeare’s godson and head of the Duke’s Company, was given the exclusive rights to perform 10 Shakespeare plays. As the director of the Duke's Company, Davenant was obliged to reform and modernize Shakespeare's plays before producing them, and the texts were "reformed" and "improved" for the stage.

During the 1660–1700 period, stage records suggest that Shakespeare, although always a major repertory author, was not as popular on the stage as were the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, although in literary criticism he was acknowledged as an untaught genius even though did not follow the French neo-classical "rules" for the drama and the three classical unities of time, place, and action. John Dryden argued in his influential Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) for Shakespeare's artistic superiority to Ben Jonson, who does follow the classical unities; as a result Jonson lands in a distant second place to "the incomparable Shakespeare", the follower of nature and the great realist of human character.

In the 18th century, the works of Shakespeare dominated the London stage, and after the Licensing Act of 1737, one fourth of the plays performed were by Shakespeare. The plays continued to be heavily cut and adapted, becoming vehicles for star actors such as Spranger Barry and David Garrick, a key figure in Shakespeare's theatrical renaissance, whose Drury Lane theatre was the centre of the Shakespeare mania which swept the nation and promoted Shakespeare as the national playwright.At Garrick's spectacular 1769 Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon, he unveiled a statue of Shakespeare and read out a poem culminating with the words "'tis he, 'tis he, / The God of our idolatry".

In contrast to playscripts, which diverged more and more from their originals, the publication of texts developed in the opposite direction. With the invention of textual criticism and an emphasis on fidelity to Shakespeare's original words, Shakespeare criticism and the publication of texts increasingly spoke to readers, rather than to theatre audiences, and Shakespeare's status as a "great writer" shifted. Two strands of Shakespearean print culture emerged: bourgeois popular editions and scholarly critical editions. Nahum Tate and Nathaniel Lee prepared editions and introduced modern scene divisions in the late 17th century, and Nicholas Rowe's edition of 1709 is considered the first scholarly edition of the plays. It was followed by many good 18th-century editions, crowned by Edmund Malone's landmark Variorum Edition, which was published posthumously in 1821.

Dryden's sentiments about Shakespeare's matchless genius were echoed without a break by unstinting praise from writers throughout the 18th century. Shakespeare was described as a genius who needed no learning, was deeply original, and unique in creating realistic and individual characters (see Timeline of Shakespeare criticism). The phenomenon continued during the Romantic era, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, William Hazlitt, and others all described Shakespeare as a transcendent genius. By the beginning of the 19th century Bardolatry was in full swing and Shakespeare was universally celebrated as an unschooled supreme genius and had been raised to the statute of a secular god and many Victorian writers treated Shakespeare's works as a secular equivalent to the Bible. "That King Shakespeare," the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, "does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible".

18th century
George McMichael and Edward Glenn, summarising the views of doubters, quote early 18th century in certain satirical and allegorical works that were later identified by anti-Stratfordians as expressing authorship doubts. In a passage in An Essay Against Too Much Reading (1728) possibly written by Matthew Concanen, Shakespeare is described as "no Scholar, no Grammarian, no Historian, and in all probability cou'd not write English" and someone who uses an historian as a collaborator. The book also says that 'instead of Reading, he [Shakespeare] stuck close to Writing and Study without Book". Again, in The Life and Adventures of Common Sense: An Historical Allegory (1769) by Herbert Lawrence, the narrator, "Common Sense", portrays Shakespeare as a thief who stole a commonplace book containing "an infinite variety of Modes and Forms to express all the different sentiments of the human mind" from his father, "Wit" and his half-brother, "Humour". He also stole a magical glass created by "Genius", which allowed him to "penetrate into the deep recesses of the Soul of Man". He used these to write his plays. Thirdly, in a possible allusion to Bacon, The Story of the Learned Pig, By an officer of the Royal Navy (1786) is a tale of a soul that has successively migrated from the body of Romulus into various humans and animals, and is currently residing in The Learned Pig, a famous performing pig at the time that was the subject of much satirical literature. He recalls a previous pre-swinish incarnation in which he was a person called "Pimping Billy", who worked as a horse-holder at the playhouse with Shakespeare and was the real author of 5 of the plays.

Shakespearean scholars have seen nothing in these works to suggest genuine doubts about Shakespeare's authorship, since they are all presented as comic fantasies. The first two booklets explicitly assert that Shakespeare wrote the works, albeit with assistance from a historian in the first, and magical aids in the second. The third does say that "Billy" was the real author of Hamlet, Othello, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream, but it also claims that he participated in numerous other historical events. Michael Dobson takes Pimping Billy to be a joke about Ben Jonson, since he is said to be the son of a character in Jonson's play Every Man in his Humour.

In the early twentieth century a document—since suspected to be a forgery—appeared to demonstrate that a Warwickshire clergyman, James Wilmot, had been the earliest person to explicitly assert that Shakespeare was not the author of the canon. He was also the first proponent of Baconian theory, the view that Francis Bacon was the true author of Shakespeare's works. He was supposed to have reached this conclusion in 1781 after searching for documents concerning Shakespeare in Warwickshire. However, there is evidence that the manuscript linking Wilmot with the Baconian thesis (supposedly a pair of lectures given by an acquaintance, James Corton Cowell, in 1805) was probably concocted in the early twentieth century. According to the "Cowell" manuscript, failure to find much evidence of Shakespeare led Wilmot to suggest that Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's works; but concerned that his views would not be taken seriously, he destroyed all evidence of his thinking, confiding his findings only to Cowell.

Debate in the 19th Century
Uneasiness about the difference between Shakespeare's godlike reputation and the humdrum facts of his biography, earlier expressed in allegorical or satirical works, began to emerge in the 19th century. In 1850, Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed the underlying question in the air about Shakespeare with his confession, "The Egyptian [i.e. mysterious] verdict of the Shakspeare Societies come to mind; that he was a jovial actor and manager. I can not marry this fact to his verse." That the perceived dissonance between the man and his works was a consequence of the deification of Shakespeare was theorized by J.M. Robertson, who speculated that "It is very doubtful whether the Baconian theory would ever have been framed had not the idolatrous Shakespeareans set up a visionary figure of the Master."

At the same time scholars were increasingly becoming aware that many plays were products of several authors' work, and that now-lost plays may have served as models for Shakespeare's published work, such as, for example, the ur-Hamlet, an earlier version of Shakespeare's play of that name. In Benjamin Disraeli's novel Venetia (1837) the character Lord Cadurcis, modelled on Byron, suggests that Shakespeare may not have written "half of the plays attributed to him", or even one "whole play" but rather that he was "an inspired adaptor for the theatres". A similar view was expressed by an American lawyer and writer, Col. Joseph C. Hart, who in 1848 published The Romance of Yachting, which for the first time stated explicitly and unequivocally in print that Shakespeare did not write the works bearing his name. Hart claimed that Shakespeare was a "mere factotum of the theatre", a "vulgar and unlettered man" hired to add obscene jokes to the plays of other writers. Hart does not suggest that there was any conspiracy, merely that evidence of the real authors's identities had been lost when the plays were published. Hart asserts that Shakespeare had been "dead for one hundred years and utterly forgotten" when old playscripts formerly owned by him were discovered and published under his name by Nicholas Rowe and Thomas Betterton. He speculates that only The Merry Wives of Windsor was Shakespeare's own work and that Ben Jonson probably wrote Hamlet. In 1852 an anonymous essay in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal also suggested that Shakespeare owned the playscripts, but had employed an unknown poor poet to write them.

In 1853, with help from Emerson, Delia Bacon, an American teacher and writer, travelled to Britain to research her belief that Shakespeare's works were written by a secret cabal to communicate the advanced political and philosophical ideas of Francis Bacon (no relation). She discussed her theories with British scholars and writers. In 1856 she wrote an article in Putnam's Monthly in which she insisted that Shakespeare of Stratford would not have been capable of writing such plays, and that they must have expressed the ideas of an unspecified great thinker. Later in 1856 William Henry Smith, in a privately-circulated letter, expressed his view that Francis Bacon himself had written the works, and the following year he published the letter as a booklet. Smith claimed to have been unaware of Delia Bacon's essay and to have held his opinion for nearly 20 years. In 1857 Bacon expanded her ideas in her book, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded. She argued that Shakespeare's plays were written by a secretive group of playwrights led by Sir Walter Raleigh and inspired by the philosophical genius of Sir Francis Bacon. Later writers such as Ignatius Donnelly portrayed Francis Bacon as the sole author. The Baconian movement attracted much attention and caught the public imagination for many years, mostly in America. Ignatius Donnelly's claim to have discovered ciphers in the works of Shakespeare revealing Bacon as a "concealed poet" were later discredited by William and Elizebeth Friedman, expert code-breakers, in their book The Shakespearian Ciphers Examined.

A new twist was added in the writings of Orville Ward Owen and Elizabeth Wells Gallup, who claimed to have uncovered evidence that Francis Bacon was the secret son of Queen Elizabeth, who had been privately married to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The couple were also the parents of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. This provided a further explanation for Bacon's anonymity. Encoded within his works was a secret history of the Tudor era. Bacon was the true heir to the throne of England, but had been excluded from his rightful place. This tragic life-story was the secret hidden in the plays. This argument was taken up by several other writers, notably C.Y.C. Dawbarn in Uncrowned (1913) and Alfred Dodd in The Personal Poems of Francis Bacon (1931) and many other publications.

The American poet Walt Whitman declared himself agnostic on the issue and refrained from endorsing an alternative candidacy. Voicing his skepticism to Horace Traubel, Whitman remarked, ""While I am not yet ready to say Bacon I am decidedly unwilling to say Shaksper. I do not seem to have any patience with the Shaksper argument: it is all gone for me-all up the spout. The Shaksper case is about closed."

In 1891 the archivist James H. Greenstreet identified a pair of 1599 letters by the Jesuit spy George Fenner in which he reported that William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby was "busy penning plays for the common players." Greenstreet proposed Derby as the real hidden author. Greenstreet's theory was revived by the American writer Robert Frazer, who argued in The Silent Shakespeare (1915) that the actor William Shakespeare merely commercialised the productions of more elevated authors, sometimes adapting older works. He believed that Derby was the principal figure behind the Shakespeare plays and was the sole author of the sonnets and narrative poems. He concludes that "William Stanley was William Shakespeare".

20th Century Candidates
After Derby, the first notable new candidate was Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland. German literary critic Karl Bleibtreu supported the nomination of Rutland as sole author of the canon in 1907, after an earlier critic had suggested that he may have written the comedies. Rutland's candidacy enjoyed a brief flowering, promoted by a number of other authors over the next few years. Rutland's authorship was defended by the suggestion that the plots of the plays reflected details of his life, an argument that was to become important to claims for candidates proposed in the 20th century.

Starting in 1908, Sir George Greenwood engaged in a series of well-publicised debates with Shakespearean biographer Sir Sidney Lee and author J. M. Robertson. Throughout his numerous books on the authorship question, Greenwood limited himself to arguing against the traditional attribution, without supporting any alternative candidate. Mark Twain, commenting on the lack of a literary paper trail in 1908, said, "Many poets die poor, but this is the only one in history that has died THIS poor; the others all left literary remains behind. Also a book. Maybe two." Twain strongly suspected, as a 'Brontosaurian', that Bacon wrote the works. H. L. Mencken wrote a withering review of the work, concluding that it makes sorry reading for those who revered Twain.

In 1918, Professor Abel Lefranc, a renowned authority on François Rabelais, published the first volume of Sous le masque de "William Shakespeare" in which he provided detailed arguments for the claims of the Earl of Derby. Many readers were impressed by Lefranc's arguments and by his undoubted scholarship, and a large international body of literature resulted. Lefranc continued to publish arguments in favour of Derby's candidature throughout his life.

In 1920, an English school-teacher, John Thomas Looney, published Shakespeare Identified, proposing a new candidate for the authorship in Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. This theory gained many notable advocates, including Sigmund Freud. In 1922, Looney joined Greenwood in founding The Shakespeare Fellowship, an international organization dedicated to promote discussion and debate on the authorship question. Some followers of Looney, notably Percy Allen, developed what came to be known as Prince Tudor theory, which adapted the arguments of Owen and Gallup about a hidden child of the queen's. Allen argued that Elizabeth and Oxford had an affair which resulted in the birth of a son, who became the Earl of Southampton. The sonnets told the story of this affair, and were addressed to the Earl, covertly revealing that he was the son of the queen. Allen's theories were expanded upon in This Star of England (1952) by Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn Sr..

By the early 20th century, the public had tired of cryptogram-hunting, and the Bacon movement faded. The result was increased interest in Derby and Oxford as alternative candidates.

In 1923, Archie Webster wrote the first serious essay on the candidacy of playwright Christopher Marlowe, who was first suggested by Wilbur E. Ziegler in the foreword to his 1895 novel, It Was Marlowe: A Story of the Secret of Three Centuries. Marlowe continues to attract supporters, and in 2001, the Australian documentary film maker Michael Rubbo released the TV film Much Ado About Something, which explores the theory in some detail. It has played a significant part in bringing the Marlovian theory to the attention of the greater public.

Since then a great many candidates have been put forward, including Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway, his supposed girlfriend Anne Whateley, and numerous scholars, aristocrats and poets. New candidates are regularly put forward, such as Mary Sidney (proposed in 1931), Edward Dyer (proposed in 1943), William Nugent (proposed in 1978) and Henry Neville (proposed in 2005). Some candidates have been promoted by single authors, others have gathered several published supporters. Sidney in particular has been promoted in several publications in the 21st century, notably Robin Williams's Sweet Swan of Avon, in which she is presented as the central figure in the literary circles of the era. Some suggestions do not necessarily imply a secret author, but an alternative life-history for Shakespeare himself, including the claim that he was an Arab whose real name was "Sheikh Zubayr". This was first proposed in the 19th century, and developed seriously by Iraqi writer Safa Khulusi in the 1960s.

Since the publication of Charlton Ogburn Jr.'s The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Myth and the Reality in 1984, the Oxfordian theory, boosted in part by the advocacy of several Supreme Court justices, high-profile theatre professionals, and a limited number of academics, has become the most popular alternative authorship theory.

In 2007, the New York Times surveyed 265 Shakespeare teachers on the topic. To the question "Do you think there is good reason to question whether William Shakespeare of Stratford is the principal author of the plays and poems in the canon?", 6% answered "yes" and an additional 11% responded "possible", and when asked if they "mention the Shakespeare authorship question in your Shakespeare classes?", 72% answered "yes". When asked what best described their opinion of the Shakespeare authorship question, 61% answered that it was a "A theory without convincing evidence" and 32% called the issue "A waste of time and classroom distraction".

In September 2007, the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition sponsored a "Declaration of Reasonable Doubt" to encourage new research into the question of Shakespeare's authorship, which has been signed by more than 1,700 people, including 295 academics. While the great majority of the academic community continues to endorse the traditional attribution, the authorship question has achieved some degree of acceptance as a legitimate research topic. In late 2007, Brunel University of London began offering a one-year MA program on the Shakespeare authorship question, and in 2010, Concordia University (Portland, Oregon) opened a multi-million dollar Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre, under the direction of authorship doubter Daniel Wright, a Shakespeare scholar and Concordia's professor of English.

Alleged early doubts
Mainstream scholars argue that all contemporary evidence consistently identifies Shakespeare as the author of the canon. However, proponents of alternative authors have claimed to have found coded or implicit expressions of doubt in the writings of contemporaries.

In the early 20th century, Walter Begley and Bertram G. Theobald claimed that Elizabethan satirists Joseph Hall and John Marston alluded to Francis Bacon as the true author of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece by using the sobriquet "Labeo" in a series of poems published in 1597-8. They take this to be a coded reference to Bacon on the grounds that the name derives from Rome's most famous legal scholar, Marcus Labeo, with Bacon holding an equivalent position in Elizabethan England. Hall denigrates several poems by Labeo and states that he passes off criticism to "shift it to another's name". This is taken to imply that he published under a pseudonym. In the following year Marston used Bacon's Latin motto in a poem and seems to quote from Venus and Adonis, which he attributes to Labeo. Theobald argued that this confirmed that Hall's Labeo was known to be Bacon and that he wrote Venus and Adonis. Critics of this view argue that the name Labeo derives from Attius Labeo, a notoriously bad poet, and that Hall's Labeo could refer to one of many poets of the time, or even be a composite figure, standing for the triumph of bad verse. Also, Marston's use of the Latin motto is a different poem from the one which alludes to Venus and Adonis. Only the latter uses the name Labeo, so there is no link between Labeo and Bacon.

In 1948 Charles Wisner Barrell argued that the Envoy, or postscript, to Thomas Edward's poem Narcissus (1595) identified the Earl of Oxford as Shakespeare. The Envoy uses allegorical nicknames in praising several Elizabethan poets, among them "Adon". This is generally accepted to be an allusion to Shakespeare as the mythical Adonis from his poem Venus and Adonis. In the next stanzas, Edwards mentions a poet dressed "in purple robes", "whose power floweth far." Since purple is, among other things, a symbol of aristocracy, most scholars accept that he is discussing an unidentified aristocratic poet. Barrell argued that the stanzas about Adon and the anonymous aristocrat must be seen together. He stated that Edwards is revealing that Adon (Shakespeare) is really the Earl of Oxford, forced by the Queen to use a pseudonym. Variations on Barrell's argument have been repeated by Diana Price and Roger Stritmatter. James Rubenstein argues that the same passage points to Sir Henry Neville. Mainstream scholars assert that Edwards is discussing two separate poets.

Many other passages supposed to contain hidden references to one or another candidate have been identified. Oxfordian writers have found ciphers in the writings of Francis Meres. Marlovian writer Peter Farey claims to have deciphered a coded message on Shakespeare's tomb referring to Marlowe's hidden authorship.

Various anti-Stratfordian writers have interpreted poems by Ben Jonson, including his prefatory poem to the First Folio, as oblique references to Shakespeare's identity as a frontman for another writer. They have also identified him with such literary characters as the laughingstock Sogliardo in Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour, the literary thief poet-ape in Jonson's poem of the same name, and the foolish poetry-lover Gullio in the university play The Return from Parnassus. Such characters are taken as evidence that the London theatrical world knew Shakespeare was a mere front for an unnamed author whose identity could not be explicitly given.