The Shakespeare Authorship Question:
Who Wrote Shakespeare's Works

To believe the man from Stratford was the author because you have been told so is one thing. To refuse to investigate it after it has been called into question is sheer obstinacy. To believe it after investigating the matter is, in point of fact, absolute idiocy--in a very literal sense of the word.

We have historical evidence for every single writer of the period. All of them! Except one. We have zero evidence that the supposed author of the greatest works in the English language could even write! That's right. Zero evidence. There is not so much as a grocery list written by the man from Stratford, nor even a letter, much less a manuscript. There are no letters to him, or letters about him, either.

Of course, we have no historical evidence that Mark Twain was a writer, either, other than his name on the title page of published works. But we know that "Mark Twain" was a pseudonym. And we know that Samuel Clemens was the author (for whom there is a plethora of historical evidence). Get the picture? In the face of such realities, only a congenital idiot can continue to believe that Stratford is the author--or worse, that there is no question in the matter.

And that is just the start.

Shakespeare's plays and poems are works of majesty and beauty. But the notion that the Stratfordian money-lender wrote them is patently absurd. Multiple authors, singly or in combination, make the best candidates. Before long, I expect that you will come to understand and agree.

Contents

• Part I: The Case Against Stratford
  Assessing the evidence--and the lack of it--for the case that the man from Statford was the author.
   
• Part II: The Serial Authorship Alternative
  Assessing the evidence for some of the more prominent candidates that have been proposed, along
  with a theory of "serial authorship", which suggests that different people took on the mantle, at different
  times.
   
• Part III: A Methodology for Candidate Evaluation
  A proposal for a way to proceed that might--in time--put the question to rest.
  • Vocabulary Used in Shakespeare's Works
  • WordsInTotal.lst (28,654 words)
  • ShakespeareVocabularyAnalysis.zip (zip file containing processing scripts and text files)
     
• Part IV: References
  All of the references are included as links in the body of the article. This section prints out the addresses
  for web links, so that someone who is using a printed copy can find them.

(Originally published in 2006. Extensively revised and expanded in 2014.)