Sometime in 1592 a dying pamphleteer named Robert Greene sneered in print at an "upstart crow, beautified with our feathers" — an actor with the gall to write plays, mocked with the pun "Shake-scene". It is the earliest clear reference to William Shakespeare's London theatre career, and it is a jibe that only makes sense aimed at a working playwright of flesh and blood. Yet for a century and a half, a persistent minority has insisted that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon could not have written the works that bear his name.
The doubt is a surprisingly modern invention: no one questioned the authorship in Shakespeare's lifetime, nor for two centuries afterwards. The movement began in earnest in the 1850s with Delia Bacon, an American writer who argued the plays were produced by a circle around Sir Francis Bacon; her book found few readers, and she died in an asylum. Baconians then spent decades hunting for ciphers supposedly hidden in the First Folio. In 1920 an English schoolmaster with the gift-to-his-critics name of J. Thomas Looney published "Shakespeare" Identified, proposing Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, and Oxfordianism became the dominant heresy. Its converts have included Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles and the actors Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance; Mark Twain had already teased the Stratford record in Is Shakespeare Dead? in 1909. More than 80 candidates have now been proposed, from Christopher Marlowe to Queen Elizabeth I herself.
The case for Oxford — and its fatal flaw
The Oxfordian argument runs on parallels. De Vere was a courtier poet who travelled in Italy and knew the law, falconry and palace intrigue; the plays, the argument goes, breathe an aristocratic air that no glover's son from a market town could have inhaled. The snobbery sits close to the surface — and the counter-evidence sits closer. Stratford's grammar school, free to a burgess's son, offered precisely the punishing Latin and rhetorical training the plays display. More fatally, Oxford died in 1604, and roughly a dozen plays are generally dated after that year on solid evidence: Macbeth echoes the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, while The Tempest draws on accounts of the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture on Bermuda, which circulated only from 1610. Oxfordians must argue that the late plays were written early and released from a stockpile — a theory engineered to survive its own refutation.
What the record actually shows
The documentary trail tying the Stratford man to the plays is, by Elizabethan standards, unusually thick. In 1598 Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia praised Shakespeare by name as England's finest dramatist for both comedy and tragedy, listing a dozen plays; from around that year his name began appearing on printed quartos as a selling point. Court accounts for 1595 record payment to Shakespeare, Richard Burbage and Will Kempe as leaders of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and in 1599 he became a shareholder in the Globe. His 1616 will left money for mourning rings to his "fellows" John Heminges, Richard Burbage and Henry Condell — and seven years later Heminges and Condell compiled the First Folio, in which Ben Jonson's eulogy hails the "Sweet Swan of Avon", while a monument in Stratford's Holy Trinity Church, in place by 1623, commemorates him explicitly as a writer. To crown anyone else, all of this must become a co-ordinated conspiracy spanning decades, which not one participant ever betrayed.
Sceptics point instead to the six surviving, shakily written signatures, the lack of literary manuscripts and a will that mentions no books. None of this is remarkable: almost no personal papers survive for any playwright of the era, and wills rarely itemised books, which belonged in a separate inventory now lost. Modern computational stylometry has sharpened the picture rather than blurred it. Shakespeare's verbal fingerprints are measurably distinct from those of Bacon, Oxford and Marlowe — the last a candidate whose case requires him to have faked his well-documented death at Deptford in 1593. The same techniques show Shakespeare collaborating like any working professional: Thomas Middleton, George Peele and John Fletcher all left traces in the canon, and in 2016 the New Oxford Shakespeare formally credited Marlowe as co-author of the three Henry VI plays. The rival geniuses turn out to have been colleagues, not ghostwriters.
Occam's razor rarely cuts cleaner. Against a grammar-school boy with talent, ambition and a share in a playhouse stands a decades-long conspiracy contradicted by every scrap of surviving paper. The plays were written by William Shakespeare of Stratford — a conclusion just ordinary enough that some people will never stop resisting it.
Quiz nuggets
- Serious doubt about Shakespeare's authorship began only in the 1850s, when Delia Bacon championed a circle around Sir Francis Bacon.
- The Oxfordian theory, naming Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, was launched by schoolmaster J. Thomas Looney in 1920.
- Oxford died in 1604, before the generally accepted dates of plays including Macbeth and The Tempest.
- Ben Jonson's eulogy in the 1623 First Folio calls Shakespeare the "Sweet Swan of Avon", tying the playwright to Stratford.
- In 2016 the New Oxford Shakespeare credited Christopher Marlowe as co-author of the three Henry VI plays.