The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Works Shakespeare’s authorship of the works commonly attributed to him is amply attested by documentary evidence from his own time and beyond. His name first appears in print on the titlepages of *Venus and Adonis (1593) and The *Rape of Lucrece (1594).

As was customary, his earliest plays were published without ascription to their author, but his name appears on titlepages of many plays from 1598 onwards and of the Sonnets in 1609. Many writers refer to him by name as the author of plays and poems during his lifetime and later, most significantly in the private conversations of around Christmas 1618 between Ben *Jonson and William *Drummond of Hawthornden. There are many manuscript allusions. The First  Folio* of 1623 prints tributes including  Jonson’s ‘To the Memory of my Beloved the Author Mr William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us’, in which Shakespeare is described as the ‘sweet swan of Avon.’ The inscriptions on the memorial in Holy Trinity Church Stratford-upon-Avon compare him to great figures of antiquity and praise ‘what he hath writ.’

No questions were raised until the late eighteenth century, when James Wilmot, a literary scholar and clergyman, came up with the idea that the true author of the works was Francis Bacon*. The idea re-surfaced in 1848 in a book by an American lawyer, Colonel Joseph C. Hart, called The Romance of Yachting and gathered force with the work of Delia Bacon, a mad American lady who in 1856 sought to open the Stratford grave in the hope of finding evidence to support her case that the plays were the work of a committee including Francis Bacon*, Edmund Spenser*, and Sir Walter Ralegh*. This resulted in the forming of both an American and an English Bacon Society, which still exist. It grew in force in the following years, since when at least 60 candidates, from including Queen Elizabeth I* downwards, have been proposed. In recent times the most popular have been Bacon, Christopher Marlowe*, and the Earl of Oxford*. The list grows year by year. 

The most common anti-Stratfordian arguments are that Shakespeare was of relatively humble origins, is not known to have travelled overseas and came from a small provincial town, where he could not have received a good enough education to have written the plays. The facts are that it is not necessary to be an aristocrat to be a great writer - Jonson, who like Shakespeare did not attend a university, was the son of a bricklayer, Marlowe’s father was a cobbler - that the plays show no knowledge of foreign countries that could not have been obtained from books or from conversation, and that Stratford had a good grammar school whose pupils received a rigorous education in the classics which would more than account for the learning displayed in the works.

See S. *Schoenbaum, Shakespeare ‘s Lives (1988, revised 1991.)

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