Vere is currently the most popular not-Shakespeare candidate. His adherents condescendingly refer to William S. as "the Stratford man." Like the Baconians, they find Vere's name cryptographically hidden in the plays. They persuaded several Supreme Court Justices to hear them argue that Vere was the author. The justices' verdict was that the Oxfordians had not proved their case. I myself have spent (that is, "lost") many hours discussing the authorship question with an Oxfordian and I may say that she was damnably annoying. I'm sorry, Deborah.

 This is a variant of 1. above.

Another variant of 1.

This double-barreled theory was expounded to me over a vegetarian lunch by a young woman of heart-stopping charm who told me that she had read it in a book. I may not have all the details straight.

6. Shakespeare didn't write the plays!  They are the composite result of historical influences of his time, the errors of the typographers in the printing house, and the accretions of his editors. Thus Queen Elizabeth, by this theory, is one of the authors of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In fact, the real author of any of Shakespeare's plays should be considered to be its proofreader/typesetter.

This theory, which I am sure I have badly misrepresented, is a part of the critical school known as new historicist analysis, and it goes a long way to explaining why there are three hundred and fifty playwrights just as good as Shakespeare, all born at about the same time.

This theory was explained to me in a bar by a very charming student, who said that it was taught in an academic course she had taken. I doubt if the proponents of this theory had ever been involved in a collaboration. The student declined to give me her phone number.

Anyway we have an example of Shakespeare's collaboration with another living playwright: The Two Noble Kinsmen. For some reason it's not as popular as, say, Hamlet.

This breathtaking assertion appeared one summer in Le Monde. Its advocate was subsequently assassinated, though apparently not for his poor scholarship.

This conclusion is apparently based on the idea that some of AWW is in rhyme, which Middleton statistically used more than Shakespeare. I have tried to deal with this rhyme question in my notes to my own edition of the play, specificially at note 42.

I am sorry to be so far behind contemporary scholarship. I'm not a scholar, and I love secondary sources as I love measles. (In this case the primary source is Shakespeare's play; the secondary source is the critical verbiage written about it, like my entire web page.) This business of trying to wedge Shakespeare's contemporaries into the authorship of his plays I find irritating and frivolous, but I cannot possibly be so cutting about it as was George Bernard Shaw, who wrote:

Mind, I am no admirer of the Elizabethan school. When Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, whose collected essays on the English drama I am now engaged in reading, says: "Surely the crowning glory of our nation is our Shakespear; and remember he was one of a great school," I almost burst with the intensity of my repudiation of the second clause in that utterance. What Shakespear got from his "school" was the insane and hideous rhetoric which is all that he has in common with Jonson, Webster, and the whole crew of insufferable bunglers and dullards whose work stands out as vile even at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when every art was corrupted to the marrow by the orgie called the Renaissance, which was nothing but the vulgar exploitation in the artistic professions of the territory won by the Protestant movement . . . our literary men, always fifty years behind their time because they never look at anything nor listen to anything, but go on working up what they learnt in their boyhood when they read books instead of writing them, still serve up Charles Lamb's hobby, and please themselves by observing that Cyril Toumeur could turn out pretty pairs of lines and string them monotonously together, or that Greene had a genuine groatsworth of popular wit, or that Marlowe, who was perhaps good enough to make it possible to believe that if he had been born thirty years ago he might now have been a tolerable imitator of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, dealt in a single special quality of "mighty line." On the strength of these discoveries, they keep up the tradition that these men were slightly inferior Shakespears. Beaumont and Fletcher are, indeed, sometimes cited as hardly inferior; but I will not go into that. I could not do justice to it in moderate language. --Shaw on Shakespeare

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in overplus.
More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus . . .

B. The first reference we have to Shakespeare as a playwright was made by the dying Robert Greene in 1592, who accused Shakespeare of ingratitude, calling him an "upstart crow," and paraphrased a line from Henry VI Part 3 in his attack. The actors in his company thought that Shakespeare was the author of the plays. Heminges and Condell, actors with Shakespeare in The King's Men, when they published the Folio edition of the plays, put Shakespeare's name on it, and Ben Jonson contributed a poem in the preface dedicated to Shakespeare. In his Timber, or Discoveries, a book of notes Jonson may not have intended to publish, and which in fact was not published until 1641, four years after Jonson's death, Jonson discusses Shakespeare's shortcomings as a craftsman and strengths as a person.

C. Norman Holland, who taught Shakespeare at M.I.T., began his course by announcing that we would study "the plays by Will Shakespeare, or some other playwright of that name."

Ultimately, why bother with this nonsense at all? Shakespeare, being dead, is oblivious to deconstruction and historical revision. But if we the living begin to accept conclusions that ignore a huge body of historical and scientific evidence, we rapidly approach a pernicious area. We might allow people to say with impunity that there was never a Holocaust, that Japanese-American citizens weren’t locked up in camps during World War II, that Thomas Jefferson didn’t believe in the separation of church and state, that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by a monstrous conspiracy in which 80,000,000+ people participated, that global warming is a Liberal scam or that the institution of slavery in the United States was "beneficial" to the slaves. (Some of the exponents of these ideas also believe that the earth is flat.)

George Orwell gave the problem its most precise expression in his novel 1984. He wrote in 1948, when Hitler and Fascism had only recently been vanquished, and Stalin's Communism was at full strength:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.
If that is granted, all else follows.