Who wrote the works of Shakespeare?

“I would love to find a contemporary document that said William Shakespeare was the dramatist of Stratford-upon-Avon written during his lifetime. There’s lots and lots of unexamined legal records rotting away in the national archives; it is just possible something will one day turn up…”

Sir Stanley WellsHonorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and a leading Shakespeare scholar of his generation
Newsweek, 29 December 2014

So far, no such document has turned up.

At least two dozen of Shakespeare’s literary contemporaries each left a documentary trace of a writing life. Shakspere of Stratford left no such trace. Until that gap is closed, the honest verdict on who wrote the works of Shakespeare is the Scottish one: not proven. This site does not claim that the Stratford man did not write the works, only that the case that he did has never met the standard those two dozen contemporaries meet. The same can be said of every alternative candidate: none of them is proven either. The question is open, and this site keeps it that way: an enquiry, not a campaign.