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Little is known of Shakespeare's personal life, and some anti-Stratfordians take this as circumstantial evidence against his authorship. [37] Further, the lack of biographical information has sometimes been taken as an indication of an organised attempt by government officials to expunge all traces of Shakespeare, including perhaps his school records, to conceal the true author's identity.
Jonathan Bate writes, "No one in Shakespeare's lifetime or the first two hundred years after his death expressed the slightest doubt about his authorship." [2] Proponents of alternative authors, however, claim to find hidden or oblique expressions of doubt in the writings of Shakespeare's contemporaries and in later publications.
Mainstream Shakespeare scholars maintain that biographical interpretations of literature are unreliable for attributing authorship, [10] and that the convergence of documentary evidence for Shakespeare's authorship—title pages, testimony by other contemporary poets and historians and official records—is the same as that for any other author ...
Although the play's reputation improved somewhat in the latter half of the 20th century, the examination of authorship has intensified, generally along three possibilities: 1) Shakespeare wrote the play alone, 2) he co-wrote it with another author, and 3) he had nothing to do with the writing of it at all.
The Shakespeare canon is generally defined by the 36 plays published in the First Folio (1623), some of which are thought to be collaborations or to have been edited by others, and two co-authored plays, Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1609) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634); two classical narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594); a collection of 154 sonnets and "A ...
In 2008, John Hudson, scholar and theatre producer, introduced the idea that Lanier wrote the works of Shakespeare. [2] [5] [6] Hudson found similarities between the works of Shakespeare and Lanier's poetry book Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. He also noted her educated background and cosmopolitan upbringing as support of the idea.
While accepting Shakespeare's own authorship of the canon, Leo Daugherty, who wrote Stanley's life for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), has argued in a recent book that Stanley is the Fair Youth of Shakespeare's sonnets and that Barnfield is the "Rival Poet". [23]
Oxfordians also believe that Rev. Dr. John Ward's 1662 diary entry stating that Shakespeare wrote two plays a year "and for that had an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of £1,000 a year" as a critical piece of evidence, since Queen Elizabeth I gave Oxford an annuity of exactly £1,000 beginning in 1586 that was continued until his ...