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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.
Of the three booklets mentioned, the first two explicitly assert that Shakespeare wrote the works, albeit with assistance from a historian in the first, and magical aids in the second. [35] The third does say that "Billy" was the real author of Hamlet , Othello , As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream , but it also claims that he ...
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 ...
[31] His discovery that Act 1 was unique in the amount of all of these rhetorical devices when compared with the rest of the canon led him to conclude that Shakespeare did not write it. In 1979, MacDonald P. Jackson approached the issue from another new perspective; a rare word test. His results showed a marked difference between Act 1, 2.1 and ...
Wilkins, who with Shakespeare was a witness in the Bellott v. Mountjoy lawsuit of 1612, [8] has been an obvious candidate for the author of the non-Shakespearean matter in the play's first two acts; Wilkins wrote plays very similar in style, and no better candidate has been found.
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 ...
A pamphlet entitled The Story of the Learned Pig (circa 1786) and alleged research by James Wilmot have been described by some as the earliest instances of the claim that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's works, but the Wilmot research has been exposed as a forgery, and the pamphlet makes no direct reference to Bacon.
Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles. [200] By the time of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of ...