# Someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote his plays

**No verdict.** The documentary record overwhelmingly supports the Stratford glover's son as the author, and no scholarly consensus questions it; but the public debate itself remains genuinely alive, sustained by real gaps in the biography.

Category: Lost History & Ancient Mysteries · Era: Renaissance England · First circulated: 1850s · Believed by: a small, vocal public minority; ~6% of surveyed Shakespeare professors
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/shakespeare-authorship

## Summary
For over 150 years, a persistent minority has argued that the glover's son from Stratford lacked the education and life to write the greatest plays in English, and that the true author was a nobleman, a spy, or a fellow playwright hiding behind his name. Scholars overwhelmingly disagree.

## The claim
That William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon (an actor and businessman with no university education and no surviving manuscripts or letters) could not have written the plays and poems attributed to him, and that the real author was someone else, most often Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, writing under a pseudonym or front man.

## Origin and timeline
- 1592–1598: Contemporary writers already name Shakespeare as a working playwright, including Francis Meres, who lists a dozen of his plays in print in 1598.
- 1623: Shakespeare's former colleagues publish the First Folio, collecting 36 plays and crediting him by name, seven years after his death.
- 1850s: The first published doubts appear, driven partly by the Victorian assumption that only a university-trained gentleman could have written works of such range.
- 1920: Schoolteacher J. T. Looney publishes 'Shakespeare Identified,' proposing Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the true author, the theory that still dominates the doubt movement.
- 2007: A New York Times survey of 265 American Shakespeare professors finds 6% say there is good reason to doubt Stratford authorship and 11% say 'possibly'; 61% call it 'a theory without convincing evidence.'

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: No manuscripts, letters, or a library survive in Shakespeare's hand.
  Evidence: True, and unusual for a writer of his stature, but ordinary for the period. Almost no working-playwright manuscripts survive from Elizabethan London generally; paper was reused, and personal papers of commoners were rarely kept. Absence of survival is not absence of authorship.
- Claim: A glover's son with no university degree could not have had the vocabulary or classical knowledge in the plays.
  Evidence: Shakespeare almost certainly attended Stratford's King Edward VI grammar school, which is undocumented directly but was free to local boys and taught rigorous Latin, rhetoric, and classical literature: the same foundation many contemporaries without a university degree, such as Ben Jonson, drew on.
- Claim: Contemporary references calling him the author could describe a frontman for the real, hidden writer.
  Evidence: Multiple independent contemporaries (a clergyman cataloguing living poets, rival playwrights, his own acting company) describe him as the working author over three decades, not merely a name on a title page, with no contemporary source ever naming a substitute.
- Claim: Edward de Vere's biography and travels line up with details in the plays.
  Evidence: Some parallels exist, but Oxford died in 1604, while the standard chronology places at least a dozen plays (including 'Macbeth,' 'King Lear,' and 'The Tempest') after that date, based on topical references, court performance records, and stylistic evolution.

## Why people believe it
- The gap between the ordinary, undocumented Stratford life and the works' erudition and range feels intuitively hard to reconcile, especially once Shakespeare was elevated to singular literary genius.
- The theory has always carried a class assumption: that towering art must come from a nobleman or university man, not a commoner, a premise many of its own proponents have stated outright.
- A gap in the evidence invites a story to fill it, and 150 years of authors, documentaries, and societies have built an entire subculture of alternative candidates and cipher-hunting around that gap.

## Sources
- Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (the First Folio), Folger Shakespeare Library (digitized 1623 original) (1623): https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeare-in-print/first-folio/
- Palladis Tamia: one of the earliest printed assessments of Shakespeare's works, Shakespeare Documented (Folger Shakespeare Library, primary-source archive) (1598): https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/palladis-tamia-one-earliest-printed-assessments-shakespeares-works-and-first
- Shakespeare Identified in Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, J. T. Looney (Cecil Palmer; the original Oxfordian text) (1920): https://archive.org/details/shakespeareident00looniala
- Shakespeare's funerary monument, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_funerary_monument
- Shakespeare authorship question, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/shakespeare-authorship