History of the Shakespeare authorship question

[b][3] 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,[4] and that certain early 18th-century satirical and allegorical tracts contain similar hints.

After being proposed by James Greenstreet in 1891, it was the advocacy of Professor Abel Lefranc, a renowned authority on Renaissance literature, which in 1918 put William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby in a prominent position as a candidate.

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.

Churchill writes that, while not a very "profound" joke, there "must have been, in the mid-eighteenth century, a certain amount of discussion as to the authenticity of the traditional authorship of Shakespeare, and the substitution of Ben Jonson is significant.

"[29] George McMichael and Edward Glenn, summarising the views of doubters, quote passages in some early 18th-century satirical and allegorical works that were later identified by anti-Stratfordians as expressing authorship doubts.

The scene from High Life Below Stairs simply ridicules the stupidity of the characters, as Samuel Schoenbaum notes, adding that, "the Baconians, who discern in Townley's farce an early manifestation of the anti-Stratfordian creed, have never been remarkable for their sense of humour".

[33] In the early twentieth century a document—since identified as a forgery—appeared to demonstrate that a Warwickshire cleric, James Wilmot, had been the earliest person to explicitly assert that Shakespeare was not the author of the canon.

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.

[6] "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".

[40] 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.

"[42] 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 wrote 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.

[45] 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 asserted explicitly and unequivocally in print that Shakespeare did not write the works bearing his name.

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.

"[58] 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."

[68] 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.

In 1916, on the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, Henry Watterson, the long-time editor of The Courier-Journal, wrote a widely syndicated front-page feature story supporting the case for Christopher Marlowe[10] and, like Zeigler, created a fictional account of how it might have happened.

in The National Review, also arguing that Marlowe wrote the works of Shakespeare, and in particular that the Sonnets were an autobiographical account of his life after 1593, assuming that his recorded death that year must have been faked.

[11] None of these shorter pieces received much attention, however, and it was not until Calvin Hoffman wrote his 1955 book, "The Man Who Was Shakespeare"[12] that general awareness of the theory gained any real ground.

In 1920, John Thomas Looney, an English school-teacher, published "Shakespeare" Identified, proposing a new candidate for the authorship in Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

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 and argued that Elizabeth and Oxford had an affair which resulted in the birth of a son, who became the Earl of Southampton.

[70][71] 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 Baconian movement faded, though its remnants remain to this day.

[72] In 1921, Greenwood, Looney, Lefranc and others joined together to create the Shakespeare Fellowship, an organisation devoted to promote discussion and debate on the authorship question but endorsing no particular candidate.

Sidney in particular has been promoted in several publications in the 21st century, including Robin Williams's Sweet Swan of Avon, in which she is presented as the central figure in the literary circles of the era.

His Englishness was first disputed in the wake of the Romantic "Shakespeare mania" (Shakespearomanie) that swept Germany, and led to assertions of his Nordic character,[81] and to claims that he was essentially German.

Healy found numerous references in the text of Hamlet to clothes which, he thought, showed that the Dane was based on a legendary Irish tailor called Howndale.

[84] The distinguished County Meath historian Elizabeth Hickey writing under the pen name of Basil Iske, claimed in 1978 that she had identified the Irish Shakespeare as the rebel and adventurer William Nugent.

[85] Sigmund Freud, before adopting the Edward de Vere identification, toyed with the notion that Shakespeare may not have been English, a doubt strengthened in 1908 after he believed he had detected Latin features in the Chandos portrait.

John Florio was proposed by Erik Reger, in an article entitled "Der Italiener Shakespeare" contributed to the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung shortly after Paladino's publication in the same year.

Lanier's authorship was proposed by John Hudson in 2007, who identified her as "a Jewish woman of Venetian ancestry", arguing that only a person with her distinctive ethnic background could have written the plays.