Who wrote Shakespeare's plays?

The claim, and the verdict

The claim: a glover's son from a market town, with no university degree, could not have written plays full of law, courtly life, Italian settings and classical learning. Someone better born or better educated must have used his name as a cover.

The verdict: the documentary evidence for William Shakespeare of Stratford is as good as for any playwright of his time, and better than for most. No document from his lifetime or the decades after it questions his authorship. The rival theories rely on silence (the lack of surviving manuscripts or letters) and on a belief that genius needs a particular kind of birth. Specialists in the period, with very few exceptions, regard the question as settled. The one real change modern scholarship has made is to show that several plays were co-written, as was normal on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage.

What the evidence shows: documents that name him

Ben Jonson, a rival playwright who knew him well, wrote two pieces about him. In the First Folio he called him “Sweet Swan of Avon”, tying the author to the river at Stratford. Later, in notes published after his own death, he wrote:

These are the people who worked with him every day. For a conspiracy to work, they would all have had to lie, in print, for decades, and leave no trace.

Where the doubts came from and how they spread

For about 230 years after his death no one doubted him. The question arose in the mid nineteenth century, at a time when Shakespeare had become a national idol and Romantic ideas about genius made it hard for some readers to accept that he had been a commercial theatre man.

• 1857: the American writer Delia Bacon published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, arguing that a group led by Sir Walter Raleigh and Francis Bacon wrote the plays.
• 1888: Ignatius Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram claimed to find coded messages from Bacon in the text. Cryptographers later showed the method could “prove” almost anything.
• 1909: Mark Twain published Is Shakespeare Dead?, leaning towards Bacon.
• 1920: J. Thomas Looney, an English schoolmaster, proposed Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, in “Shakespeare” Identified. Sigmund Freud became a supporter.
• 1955: Calvin Hoffman argued for Christopher Marlowe, who would have had to fake his death in 1593.
• 2007 and 2011: an actors' “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt” and the film Anonymous kept the Oxford theory in the news.

Notice the pattern: each candidate is of higher rank or university education, and each theory appears long after everyone who knew Shakespeare was dead. The historian James Shapiro traced this history in Contested Will (2010).

Why scholars reject the rival candidates

• Dates. The Earl of Oxford died on 24 June 1604. Plays such as Macbeth, King Lear, The Tempest and Henry VIII were written after that. The Tempest draws on reports of a shipwreck in Bermuda in 1609, and Henry VIII was new when the Globe burned down during a performance on 29 June 1613. Marlowe was killed on 30 May 1593, before most of the plays were written.
• Collaboration. Textual studies show Shakespeare co-wrote plays with John Fletcher (Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen), Thomas Middleton, George Peele and George Wilkins. That is how a working dramatist for a commercial company wrote, not how a hidden aristocrat would.
• Education. Stratford had a free grammar school where boys learned Latin grammar, rhetoric and authors such as Ovid, which is the classical learning the plays actually show. Jonson and Marlowe were also sons of tradesmen.
• Mistakes. The plays contain errors of the kind a well travelled courtier would not make, such as a coast for landlocked Bohemia in The Winter's Tale.
• Missing papers are normal. Almost no manuscripts of any professional play of the period survive. The scripts belonged to the acting companies.

There is one real twist. The New Oxford Shakespeare (2016) credited Christopher Marlowe as a co-author of the three Henry VI plays. That is collaboration on early history plays, not proof that Marlowe wrote Hamlet.

What Shakespeare himself left behind

Very few personal words survive. His own voice is clearest in the dedications of his poems; in 1593 he offered Venus and Adonis to the Earl of Southampton with the modest words “I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your Lordship”. Beyond that we have legal records, a court deposition, his will and six signatures. Scholars warn against treating his characters' speeches as his personal opinions.

In Yuga you can talk with William Shakespeare about the theatre trade, the Globe and his collaborators, by voice or text. It is an AI recreation built from the documents and plays, not the man, and its in-character lines are not historical evidence, so cite the documents above.

How to judge an authorship theory

1. Start with the documents from the writer's lifetime, not with impressions of the work.
2. Check whether the theory fits the dates of composition.
3. Ask why the theory appeared when it did, and who it flatters.
4. Be wary of codes and ciphers: with enough freedom, any long text yields hidden messages.

More on the man: questions to ask William Shakespeare, Shakespeare Day, 23 April and Tudor England's key figures. For checking quotations, see how to check if a quote is real.